Strangers (84 page)

Of course, Dom had only asked him to come talk with these people. He would be appalled to know that Parker had gone to these illegal lengths when the Salcoes had been unlocatable. But Parker never did anything by halves, and he was enjoying himself even though his heart had begun to pound and his throat had clutched up a bit.

Beyond the living room was a library. Beyond that, a small music room contained a piano, music stands, chairs, two clarinet cases, and a ballet exercise bar. Evidently, the twins liked music and dance.

Parker found nothing amiss on the first floor, so he slowly climbed the stairs, staying in the runner of plush carpet between oak inlays. The light from the first floor reached just to the top step. Above, the second-floor hallway was dark.

He stopped on the landing.

Stillness.

His hands were clammy.

He did not understand why he was clutching up. Maybe instinct. It might be wise to pay attention to his more primitive senses. But if anyone had wanted to ambush him, there had been plenty of places on the first floor ideal for the purpose, yet the rooms had been deserted.

He continued upward, and when he reached the second-floor hallway, he finally heard something. It was a cross between a
beep-
sound and a
blip-
sound, and it came from rooms on both ends of the hall. For a moment he thought the alarm system was about to go off, after all, but an alarm would have been a thousand times louder than these
beep-blips.
The sounds came in counterpointed, rhythmic patterns.

He found a switch at the head of the stairs and snapped on the overhead lights in the hall. Standing motionless once more, he listened for noises other than the curious
beep-blips.
He heard none. There was something familiar about the sound, but it eluded him.

His curiosity was greater than his fear. He had always been compelled by a chronic curiosity, with frequent acute attacks of same, and if he had not allowed it to drive him in the past, he’d never have become a successful painter. Curiosity was the heart of creativity. Therefore, he looked
both ways along the hall, then turned right and walked cautiously toward one source of the
beep-blips.

At the end of the hallway, there were two distinct sets of beeping sounds, each with a slightly different rhythm, both coming from a dark room where the door was three-quarters shut. Poised to flee, he pushed the door all the way open. Nothing leaped at him out of the darkness. The beeping became louder, but only because the door was out of the way now. He saw that the room was not entirely dark. On the far wall, thin ribbons of pale gray light outlined drapes that were drawn across a very large window or perhaps a pair of balcony doors; the Salcoes’ Southern Colonial had lots of balconies. In addition, around the corner from the doorway, out of sight, were two sources of eerie soft green light that did little to dispel the gloom.

Parker eased forward, clicked the light switch, entered the room, saw the Salcoe twins, and thought for an instant that they were dead. They were lying on their backs in a queen-sized bed, covers drawn up to their shoulders, unmoving, eyes open. Then Parker realized that the beeping and the green light came from EEG and EKG monitors to which both girls were connected, and he saw the IV racks trailing lines to spikes inserted in their arms, so he knew they were not dead but merely in the process of being brainwashed. The chamber had none of the quality of a teenaged girl’s room; from the lack of personal mementos or any stamp of individuality, he assumed it was a guest room and that the girls had been put here in a single bed simply to make it easier to monitor them.

But where were their captors and tormentors? Were the mind-control experts so certain of the effectiveness of their drugs and other devices that they could leave the family alone and dash out for a Big Mac and fries at McDonald’s? Was there no risk at all that one of the Salcoes, in a moment of lucidity, might tear out his IV line, rise up, and flee?

Parker went to the nearest girl, looked into her blank eyes. For a few seconds she peered up unblinking, then suddenly blinked furiously—ten, twenty, thirty times—then stared unblinking again. She did not see Parker. He waved a hand across her eyes and got no reaction.

He saw that she was wearing a pair of earphones connected to a tape recorder that lay on the pillow beside her head. He leaned close to her, lifted one earphone an inch, and listened to a soft, melodic, and very soothing voice, a woman’s voice:
“On Monday morning, I slept in late. It’s a wonderful hotel for sleeping late because the staff is so quiet, so respectful. It’s actually a country club as well as a hotel, so it’s not like other places, where maids make a racket in the halls as soon as the sun rises. Oh, don’t you just love the wine country! I’d like to live there someday. Anyway, after we finally got up, Chrissie and I took a long walk
around the grounds, sort of hoping we’d run into some neat boys, but we couldn’t find any….”
The hypnotic rhythms of the woman’s voice spooked Parker. He put the earphones back in place.

Evidently, one or more of the Salcoes had remembered what they had experienced at the Tranquility Motel the summer before last. So those memories had again been repressed. Now to cover the time span of this current brainwashing session, new false memories were being implanted, a process that included the repeated playing of a tape recording that undoubtedly had subliminal as well as audible messages to impart.

Dom had explained some of it to Parker on the telephone, Saturday and Sunday nights. But Parker had not fully appreciated the hideousness of the conspiracy until he heard that insidious whisper in the Salcoe girl’s ear.

He moved to the foot of the bed and studied the other twin, whose eyes also alternated between blinkless stares and abrupt, machine-gun bursts of blinks. He wondered if he would do any physical or mental harm to them if he pulled out their IV lines, disconnected them from the machines, and moved them out of the house before their captors returned. Better to find a phone, call the police—

How long they were watching him he did not know, but suddenly he was aware that he and the twins were not alone. He jumped and whirled toward the door, where two men had entered the room. They were wearing dark slacks, white shirts with the sleeves rolled up and the collars unbuttoned, neckties loosened and askew. At the doorway behind them was another man, bespectacled and in a suit with his tie in place. They had to be government agents, for no one else would bother to wear business clothes while engaged upon activities of such a dubious nature.

One of them said, “And who the fuck are you?”

Parker did not attempt to jive them, did not foolishly claim his rights as a U.S. citizen, did not bother to say anything at all. He just took three running steps toward the drawn drapes, praying that a big window or sliding-glass balcony door lay beyond them, that it would shatter on impact, that the drapes would protect him from serious cuts, and that he would be outside and gone before they knew what happened. If the drapes were a lot wider than the window, covering more blank wall than glass, he was in big trouble. Behind him, the men shouted in surprise just as he hit the drapes, for they’d obviously believed they’d trapped him. He went through the material with the unstoppable power of a locomotive. The impact was tremendous, sending a devastating shock across his shoulder and through his chest, but something gave way with a crack and a screech and a crash of glass, and he was through into daylight, vaguely
aware that the doors had been French rather than sliding panels and that he had been lucky the lock was flimsy.

He found himself on a second-floor balcony with a pair of redwood lounge chairs and a glass-topped table, over which he fell. Even as he was going down on top of chairs, banging knees and barking shins, he was already coming up again, up and over the balcony rail, leaping out into space, praying he would not land in a particularly woody shrub and be castrated by a sharp, sturdy branch. He fell only twelve feet onto bare lawn, jarring his other shoulder and his back but breaking no bones. He rolled, scrambled to his feet, and ran.

Suddenly, in front of his eyes, foliage snapped-fluttered-shredded, and he didn’t know what was happening, and then as he continued to run, pieces of bark exploded off a tree, and he realized they were shooting at him. He heard no gunfire. Silencer-equipped weapons. He zigzagged toward the perimeter of the property, fell in an azalea bed, scrambled up, ran on, reached a hedge, threw himself over it, and kept on running.

They had been ready to kill him to stop him from spreading the news of what he had seen in the Salcoe house. Right now, they were probably hastily moving—or killing—the Salcoes. If he found a phone and called the police, and if the killers were agents of the U.S. government, whose side would the police be on? And who would they believe? One eccentric and rather curiously dressed artist with a woolly beard and flyaway hair? Or three neatly attired FBI men claiming they were in the Salcoe house on a legitimate stakeout of some kind, and that Parker Faine was, in fact, the felon they had attempted to arrest. If they demanded custody of him, would the police cooperate?

Jesus.

He ran. Abandoning the Tempo, he sprinted down the sloped wall of a shallow glen, along the rocky course of a narrow brook, between trees, through underbrush, up another wall of the same glen, into someone’s backyard, across that lawn and into another yard, alongside a house, out into a street, from that street to another. He slowed to a fast walk to avoid drawing attention to himself, but he continued to follow a twisty route away from the Salcoe house.

He knew what he had to do. The horror he had just seen had made the extremity of Dom’s plight clearer than ever. Parker had known his friend was in danger, deep in a conspiracy of monumental proportions, but knowing it in his mind was not the same as knowing it in his
guts.
There was nothing for him to do but go to Elko County. Dom Corvaisis was his friend, perhaps his best friend, and this was what friends did for each other: shared their trouble, fought back the darkness together.
He could walk away, go back to Laguna Beach to continue work on the painting that he had begun yesterday. But if he chose that course, he would never like himself very much again—which would be an intolerable circumstance, for he had always liked himself immensely!

He had to find a ride back to the Monterey Airport, catch a flight to San Francisco International, and head east from there toward Nevada. He was not concerned that the men in the Salcoes’ house would be looking for him at the airport. The only words any of them had spoken in his presence were: “And who the fuck are you?” If they did not know who he was, they would most likely figure he was a local. The keys to the Tempo had a rental-company tag on them, but they were in his pocket. In an hour or two, of course, the bad guys would trace the car to the airport, but by then he should have taken off for San Francisco.

He kept walking. On a quiet residential street he saw a young man, about nineteen or twenty, in the driveway of a more modest house than the Salcoes’, carefully scrubbing the whitewalls on the tires of a meticulously restored, banana-yellow, 1958 Plymouth Fury, one of those long jobs with a plenitude of grille and big sharky fins. The kid had a slicked-back ducktail haircut to match the era of his vehicle. Parker went up to him and said, “Listen, my car broke down, and I’ve got to get to the airport. I’m in a big hurry, so would you drive me out there for fifty bucks?”

The kid knew how to hurry. If he had not been a superb driver, he would have fishtailed out of control and spun them off the road into trees or ditches on a half-dozen tight turns, for he got all possible speed out of the big Fury. After they came through the third sharp turn alive, Parker knew he was in good hands, and he finally relaxed a bit.

At the airport, he bought a ticket for one of two remaining seats on a West Air flight leaving for San Francisco in ten minutes. He boarded the plane, half-expecting it to be halted by federal agents before it could take off. But soon they were airborne, and he could worry about something else: getting another flight from San Francisco to Reno before they tracked him that far.

•

Jack Twist went through the Blocks’ apartment from north-to west-to south-to east-facing windows, surveying the vast landscape for signs of the enemy’s observation post—or posts. At least one surveillance team would be watching the motel and diner, and no matter how well concealed they were, he had a device that would pinpoint their location.

He’d brought it from New York with the other gear—an instrument the armed forces called the HS101 Heat Analyzer. It was shaped like a
sleek futuristic raygun from the movies, with a single two-inch-diameter lens instead of a barrel. You held it by the butt and looked through the eyepiece as if peering into a telescope. Moving the viewfinder across the landscape, you saw two things: an ordinary magnified image of the terrain, and an overlaid representation of heat sources within that terrain. Plants, animals, and sun-baked rocks radiated heat, but thanks to microchip technology, the HS101’s computer could differentiate among types of thermal radiation and screen out most natural background sources. The device would show only heat from living sources larger than fifty pounds: animals bigger than house-dogs and human beings. Even if they were out there in insulated ski suits that trapped a lot of body heat, enough would escape their garments to give him a fix on them.

Jack spent a considerable length of time studying the land north of the motel, through which he had approached the place last night, but finally he decided no one was watching from that direction, and he moved to the west-facing windows in other rooms. The west also looked clear, so he went next to the windows on the south side of the apartment.

Marcie had colored the last moon in her album, and when Jack set out with the HS101 to look for surveillance teams, she came with him, staying close by his side. Maybe she had taken a liking to him because he’d spent hours talking to her in spite of her failure to respond. Or maybe she was scared of something and felt safer in his presence. Or another reason too strange to imagine. He could do nothing for her except keep talking softly to her as she accompanied him.