Sole Survivor (32 page)

What’s happened to Rose?

“We’re going to get up now,” the guy said. “Me first. Getting up, I got this piece aimed at your head. You stay flat, dug right into the sand the way you are, just the way you are, until I step back and tell you it’s okay to get up.” For emphasis, he pressed the muzzle of the gun more deeply into Joe’s face, twisting it back and forth; the inside of Joe’s cheek pressed painfully against his teeth. “You understand, Carpenter?”

“Yes.”

“I can waste you and walk away.”

“I’m cool.”

“Nobody can touch me.”

“Not me anyway.”

“I mean, I got a badge.”

“Sure.”

“You want to see it? I’ll pin it to your damn lip.”

Joe said nothing more.

They hadn’t shouted
Police,
which didn’t prove that they were phony cops, only that they didn’t want to advertise. They hoped to do their business quickly, cleanly—and get out before they were required to explain their presence to the local authorities, which would at least tangle them in inter-jurisdictional paperwork and might result in troubling questions about what legitimate laws they were enforcing. If they weren’t strictly employees of Teknologik, they had some measure of federal power behind them, but they hadn’t shouted
FBI
or
DEA
or
ATF
when they had burst out of the night, so they were probably operatives with a clandestine agency paid for out of those many billions of dollars that the government dispensed off the accounting books, from the infamous Black Budget.

Finally the stranger eased off Joe, onto one knee, then stood and backed away a couple of steps. “Get up.”

Rising from the sand, Joe was relieved to discover that his eyes were rapidly adapting to the darkness. When he had first come out of the banquet room and run north along the beach, hardly two minutes ago, the gloom had seemed deeper than it was now. The longer he remained night blind to any degree, the less likely he would be to see an advantage and to be able to seize it.

Although his rakish Panama hat was gone, and in spite of the darkness, the gunman was clearly recognizable: the storyteller. In his white slacks and white shirt, with his long white hair, he seemed to draw the meager ambient light to himself, glowing softly like an entity at a séance.

Joe glanced back and up at Santa-Fe-by-the-Sea. He saw the silhouettes of diners at their tables, but they probably couldn’t see the action on the dark beach.

Crotch-kicked, face-slammed, the disabled agent still sprawled nearby on the sand, no longer choking but gagging, in pain, and still spitting blood. He was striving to squeeze off his flow of tears by wheezing out obscenities instead of sobs.

Joe shouted, “Rose!”

The white-clad gunman said, “Shut up.”

“Rose!”

“Shut up and turn around.”

Silent in the sand, a new man loomed behind the storyteller and, instead of proving to be another Teknologik drone, said, “I have a Desert Eagle .44 magnum just one inch from the back of your skull.”

The storyteller seemed as surprised as Joe was, and Joe was
dizzied
by this turn of events.

The man with the Desert Eagle said, “You know how powerful this weapon is? You know what it’ll do to your head?”

Still softly radiant but now also as powerless as a ghost, the astonished storyteller said, “Shit.”

“Pulverize your skull, take your fat head right off your neck, is what it’ll do,” said the new arrival. “It’s a doorbuster. Now toss your gun in the sand in front of Joe.”

The storyteller hesitated.

“Now.”

Managing to surrender with arrogance, the storyteller threw the gun as if disdaining it, and the weapon thudded into the sand at Joe’s feet.

The savior with the .44 said, “Pick it up, Joe.”

As Joe retrieved the pistol, he saw the new arrival use the Desert Eagle as a club. The storyteller dropped to his knees, then to his hands and knees, but did not go all the way out until struck with the pistol a second time, whereupon he plowed the sand with his face, planting his nose like a tuber. The stranger with the .44—a black man dressed entirely in black—stooped to turn the white-maned head gently to one side to ensure that the unconscious thug would not suffocate.

The agent with the knee-smashed face stopped cursing. Now that no witnesses of his own kind were able to hear, he sobbed miserably again.

The black man said, “Come on, Joe.”

More impressed than ever with Mahalia and her odd collection of amateurs, Joe said, “Where’s Rose?”

“This way. We’ve got her.”

With the disabled agent’s sobs purling eerily across the strand behind them, Joe hurried with the black man north, in the direction that he and Rose had been heading when they were assaulted.

He almost stumbled over another unconscious man lying in the sand. This was evidently the first one who had rushed them, the one who had fired a gun.

Rose was on the beach but in the inky shadow of the bluff. Joe could barely see her in the murk, but she seemed to be hugging herself as though she were shivering and cold on this mild summer night.

He was half surprised by the wave of relief that washed through him at the sight of her, not because she was his only link to Nina but because he was genuinely glad that she was alive and safe. For all that she had frustrated and angered and sorely confused him, she was still special, for he recalled, as well, the kindness in her eyes when she had encountered him in the cemetery, the tenderness and pity. Even in the darkness, small as she was, she had an imposing presence, an aura of mystery but also of consequence and prodigious wisdom, probably the same power with which great generals and holy women alike elicited sacrifice from their followers. And here, now, on the shore of the night sea, it was almost possible to believe that she had walked out of the deeps to the west, having breathed water as easily as she now breathed air, come to land with the wonderful secrets of another realm.

With her was a tall man in dark clothes. He was little more than a spectral form—except for masses of curly blond hair that shone faintly like sinuous strands of phosphorate seaweed.

Joe said, “Rose, are you all right?”

“Just got… battered around a little,” she said in a voice taut with pain.

“I heard a shot,” he worried. He wanted to touch her, but he wasn’t sure that he should. Then he found himself with his arms around her, holding her.

She groaned in pain, and Joe started to let go of her, but she put one arm around him for a moment, embracing him to let him know that in spite of her injuries she was grateful for his expression of concern. “I’m fine, Joe. I’ll be okay.”

Shouting rose in the distance, from the bluff top beside the restaurant. And from the beach to the south, the disabled agent replied, calling feebly for help.

“Gotta get out of here,” said the blond guy. “They’re coming.”

“Who are you people?” Rose asked.

Surprised, Joe said, “Aren’t they Mahalia’s crew?”

“No,” Rose said. “Never saw them before.”

“I’m Mark,” said the man with the curly blond hair, “and he’s Joshua.”

The black man—Joshua—said something that sounded like: “We’re both in finna face.”

Rose said, “I’ll be damned.”

“Who, what? You’re in what?” Joe asked.

“It’s all right, Joe,” Rose said. “I’m surprised, but I probably shouldn’t be.”

Joshua said, “We believe we’re fighting on the same side, Dr. Tucker. Anyway, we have the same enemies.”

Out of the distance, at first as soft as the murmur of a heart, but then like the approaching hooves of a headless horseman’s steed, came the
whump-whump-whump
of helicopter rotors.

15

Having stolen nothing but their own freedom, they raced like fleeing thieves alongside the bluffs, which soared and then declined and then soared high again, almost as if mirroring Joe’s adrenaline levels.

While they were on the move, with Mark in the lead and Rose at his heels, Joe heard Joshua talking urgently to someone. He glanced back and saw the black man with a cell phone. Hearing the word
car,
he realized that their escape was being planned and coordinated even as it was unfolding.

Just when they seemed to have gotten away, the thumping promise of the helicopter became a bright reality to the south. Like a beam from the jewel eye of a stone-temple god angered by desecration, a searchlight pierced the night and swept the beach. Its burning gaze arced from the sandy cliffs to the foaming surf and back again, moving relentlessly toward them.

Because the sand was soft near the base of the palisades, they left shapeless impressions in it. Their aerial pursuers, however, wouldn’t be able to follow them by their footprints. Because this sand was never raked, as it might have been on a well-used public beach, it was disturbed by the tracks of many others who had come before them. If they had walked nearer the surf, in the area where higher tides had compacted the sand and left it smooth, their route would have been as clearly marked as if they’d left flares.

They passed several sets of switchback stairs leading to great houses on the bluffs above, some of masonry pinned to the cliff face with steel, some of wood bolted to deep pylons and vertical concrete beams. Joe glanced back once and saw the helicopter hovering by one staircase, the searchlight shimmering up the treads and across the railings.

He figured that a team of hunters might already have driven north from the restaurant and gone by foot to the beach to work methodically southward. Ultimately, if Mark kept them on the strand like this, they would be trapped between the northbound chopper and the southbound searchers.

Evidently the same thought occurred to Mark, because he suddenly led them to an unusual set of redwood stairs rising through a tall box frame. The structure was reminiscent of an early rocket gantry as built back when Cape Kennedy had been called Cape Canaveral, the spacecraft gone now and the architecture surrounding a curious void.

While they ascended, they were putting no additional distance between themselves and the chopper, but it continued to approach. Two, four, six, eight flights of steep stairs brought them to a landing where they seemed horribly exposed. The helicopter, after all, was hovering no more than a hundred feet above the beach—which put it perhaps forty feet above them as they stood atop the bluff—and hardly a hundred and fifty yards to the south. The house next door had no stairs to the shore, which made this platform even more prominent. If either the pilot or the copilot looked to the right and at the bluff top instead of at the searchlight-splashed sand below, discovery could not be avoided.

The upper landing was surrounded by a six-foot-tall, wrought-iron, gated security fence with a sharply inward-angled, spiked top to prevent unwanted visitors from gaining access by way of the beach below. It had been erected long ago, in the days when the Coastal Commission didn’t control such things.

The helicopter was now little more than a hundred yards to the south, moving forward slowly, all but hovering. Its screaming engine and clattering rotors were so loud that Joe could not have made himself heard to his companions unless he shouted.

There was no easy way to climb the fence, not in the minute or two of grace they might have left. Joshua stepped forward with the doorbuster Desert Eagle, fired one round into the lock, and kicked the gate open.

The men in the helicopter could not have heard the gunshot, and it was unlikely that the sound was perceived in the house as anything more than additional racket caused by the aircraft. Indeed, every window was dark, and all was as still as though no one was home.

They passed through the gate into an expansive, estate-size property with low box hedges, formal rose gardens, bowl fountains currently dry, antique French terra-cotta walkways lit by bronze-tulip path lights, and multilevel terraces with limestone balustrades rising to a Mediterranean mansion. There were phoenix palms, ficus trees. Massive California live oaks were underlit by landscape spots: magisterial, frost-and-black, free-form scaffoldings of branches.

Because of the artfulness of the landscape lighting, no glare spoiled any corner. The romantic grounds cast off tangled shawls of shadow, intricate laces of soft light and hard darkness, in which the four of them surely could not be seen by the pilots even as the helicopter now drew almost even with the bluff on which the estate made its bed.

As he followed Rose and Mark up stone steps onto the lowest terrace, Joe hoped that security-system motion detectors were not installed on the exterior of the enormous house, only within its rooms. If their passage activated kleigs mounted high in the trees or atop the perimeter walls, the sudden dazzle would draw the pilots’ attention.

He knew how difficult it could be even for a lone fugitive on foot to escape the bright eye of a police search chopper with a good and determined pilot—especially in comparatively open environs such as this neighborhood, which didn’t offer the many hiding places of a city’s mazes. The four of them would be altogether too easy to keep pinpointed once they had been spotted.

Earlier, an onshore breeze had come with the grace of gull wings from the sea; currently, the flow was offshore and stronger. This was one of those hot winds, called Santa Anas, born in the mountains to the east, out of the threshold of the Mojave, dry and blustery and curiously wearing on the nerves. Now a loud whispering rose from the oaks, and the great fronds of the phoenix palms hissed and rattled and creaked as though the trees were warning one another of gales that might soon descend.

Joe’s fear of an outer security line seemed unwarranted as they hurriedly climbed another short flight of stone steps to the upper terrace. The grounds remained subtly lighted, heavily layered with sheltering shadows.

Out beyond the bluff’s edge, the search chopper was parallel with them, moving slowly northward. The pilots’ attention remained focused on the beach below.

Mark led them past an enormous swimming pool. The oil-black water glimmered with fluid arabesques of silver, as though schools of strange fish with luminous scales were swimming just beneath the surface.

They were still passing the pool when Rose stumbled. She almost fell but regained her balance. She halted, swaying.

“Are you all right?” Joe asked worriedly.

“Yes, fine, I’ll be okay,” she said, but her voice was thin, and she still appeared to be unsteady.

“How badly were you hurt back there?” Joe pressed as Mark and Joshua gathered around.

“Just knocked on my ass,” she said. “Bruised a little.”

“Rose—”

“I’m okay, Joe. It’s just all this running, all those damn stairs up from the beach. I guess I’m not in as good a shape as I should be.”

Joshua was talking sotto voce on the cell phone again.

“Let’s go,” Rose said. “Come on, come on, let’s go.”

Beyond the bluff, above the beach, the helicopter was almost past the estate.

Mark led the way again, and Rose followed with renewed energy. They dashed under the roof of the arched loggia against the rear wall, where they were no longer in any danger of being spotted by the chopper pilots, and then to the corner of the house.

As they moved single file along the side of the mansion on a walkway that serpentined through a small grove of shaggy-barked melaleucas, they were abruptly pinned in the bright beam of a big flashlight. Blocking the path ahead of them, a watchman said, “Hey, who the hell are—”

Acting without hesitation, Mark began to move even as the beam flicked on. The stranger was still speaking when Mark collided with him. The two men grunted from the impact.

The flashlight flew against the trunk of a melaleuca, rebounded onto the walkway, and spun on the stone, making shadows whirl like a pack of tail-chasing dogs.

Mark swiveled the startled watchman around, put a hammerlock on him, bum-rushed him off the sidewalk and through bordering flower beds, and slammed him against the side of the house so hard that the nearby windows rattled.

Scooping up the flashlight, Joshua directed it on the action, and Joe saw that they had been challenged by an overweight uniformed security guard of about fifty-five. Mark pressed him to his knees and kept a hand on the back of his head to force his face down and away from them, so he couldn’t describe them later.

“He’s not armed,” Mark informed Joshua.

“Bastards,” the watchman said bitterly.

“Ankle holster?” Joshua wondered.

“Not that, either.”

The watchman said, “Stupid owners are pacifists or some damn thing. Won’t have a gun on the place, even for me. So now here I am.”

“We’re not going to hurt you,” Mark said, pulling him backward from the house and forcing him to sit on the ground with his back against the trunk of a melaleuca.

“You don’t scare me,” the watchman said, but he sounded scared.

“Dogs?” Mark demanded.

“Everywhere,” the guard said. “Dobermans.”

“He’s lying,” Mark said confidently.

Even Joe could hear the bluff in the watchman’s voice.

Joshua gave the flashlight to Joe and said, “Keep it pointed at the ground.” Then he produced handcuffs from a fanny pack.

Mark directed the guard to reach in back of himself and clasp his hands behind the tree. The trunk was only about ten inches in diameter, so the guard didn’t have to contort himself, and Joshua snapped the cuffs on his wrists.

“The cops are on the way,” the watchman gloated.

“No doubt riding Dobermans,” Mark said.

“Bastard,” said the watchman.

From his fanny pack, Mark withdrew a tightly rolled Ace bandage. “Bite on this,” he told the guard.

“Bite on
this,
” the guard said, indulging in one last bleat of hopeless bravado, and then he did as he was told.

Three times, Joshua wound electrician’s tape around the guard’s head and across his mouth, fixing the Ace bandage firmly in place.

From the watchman’s belt, Mark unclipped what appeared to be a remote control. “This open the driveway gate?”

Through his gag, the watchman snarled something obscene, which issued as a meaningless mumble.

“Probably the gate.”

To the guard, Joshua said, “Just relax. Don’t chafe your wrists. We’re not robbing the place. We’re really not. We’re only passing through.”

Mark said, “When we’ve been gone half an hour, we’ll call the cops so they can come and release you.”

“Better get a dog,” Joshua advised.

Taking the watchman’s flashlight, Mark led them toward the front of the house.

Whoever these guys were, Joe was glad that they were on his side.

The estate occupied at least three acres. The huge house was set two hundred feet back from the front property wall at the street. In the eye of the wide, looping driveway was a four-tier marble fountain: four broad scalloped bowls, each supported by three leaping dolphins, bowls and dolphins diminishing in scale as they ascended. The bowls were full of water, but the pump was silent, and there were no spouts or cascades.

“We’ll wait here,” Mark said, leading them to the dolphins.

The dolphins and bowls rose out of a pool with a two-foot-high wall finished with a broad cap of limestone. Rose sat on the edge—and then so did Joe and Mark.

Taking the remote control they had gotten from the watchman, Joshua walked along the driveway toward the entrance gate, talking on the cellular phone as he went.

Dogs of warm Santa Ana wind chased cat-quick leaves and curls of papery melaleuca bark along the blacktop.

“How do you even know about me?” Rose asked Mark.

“When any enterprise is launched with a one-billion-dollar trust fund, like ours,” Mark said, “it sure doesn’t take long to get up to speed. Besides, computers and data technology are what we’re about.”

“What enterprise?” Joe asked.

The answer was the same mystifying response that Joshua had given on the beach, “In finna face.”

“And what’s that mean?”

“Later, Joe,” Rose promised. “Go on, Mark.”

“Well, so, from day one, we’ve had the funds to try to keep track of all promising research in every discipline, worldwide, that could conceivably lead to the epiphany we expect.”

“Maybe so,” Rose said, “but you people have been around two years, while the largest part of my research for the past
seven
years has been conducted under the tightest imaginable security.”

“Doctor, you showed enormous promise in your field until you were about thirty-seven—and then suddenly your work appeared to come almost to a complete halt, except for a minor paper published here or there from time to time. You were a Niagara of creativity—and then went dry overnight.”

“And that indicates what to you?”

“It’s the signature pattern of a scientist who’s been co-opted by the defense establishment or some other branch of government with sufficient power to enforce a total information blackout. So when we see something like that, we start trying to find out exactly where you’re at work. Finally we located you at Teknologik, but not at any of their well-known and accessible facilities. A deep subterranean, biologically secure complex near Manassas, Virginia. Something called ‘Project 99.’”

While he listened intently to the conversation, Joe watched as, out at the end of the long driveway, the ornate electric gate rolled aside.

“How much do you know about what we do on Project 99?” Rose asked.

“Not enough,” Mark said.

“How can you know anything at all?”

“When I say we track ongoing research worldwide, I don’t mean that we limit ourselves to the same publications and shared data banks that any science library has available to it.”

With no animosity, Rose said, “That’s a nice way of saying you try to penetrate computer security systems, hack your way in, break encryptions.”