The Fury and the Terror (14 page)

The telephone rang, and rang. The answering machine didn't cut in. Geoff took the call.

"This is Ellis Babb, Channel Six News in San Francisco. Am I speaking to Mr. Riley Waring?"

"No, I'm Wiley Herring, you have the wrong number," Geoff said, and hung up. He pulled the phone plug with a troubled sigh and continued roaming.

There was some evidence in the master bedroom that Riley and Betts had packed a few things and gone somewhere to escape the attention focused on them, a consequence of Eden's eerily accurate premonition at the stadium. Out the back way, unobserved, across the creek, and through a neighbor's horse pasture. With or without Eden? Riley's vet van and Betts's Audi were in the carport. Eden's 4WD Jimmy was missing, probably still parked on the Cal Shasta campus.

Geoff looked in her bedroom. Bed unmade. She hadn't put the iron or ironing board away that morning. Unlikely that she'd been home since then, but he made sure. Her favorite hairbrush was on the dressing table. So was her orthodontic retainer. And her birth control pills, in a supposedly secret drawer of her jewelry box. But Geoff had been in her room before, when no one was at home. He knew all of Eden's hiding places.

Had she met her parents somewhere, or was she staying out of sight at a friend's house?

He doubted that the telephone answering machine would provide useful information, but he listened patiently to the messages on the full tape. One call from Betts's mother, who was in an assisted-living community in Sonoma. She was eighty years old, and much of what she had to say, though it sounded cheery, was unintelligible. The next call was from someone who identified herself as Rona Harvester's press secretary. She left a White House number where Eden could reach the admiring First Lady. All of the other calls had been placed by local and national media people, and they all wanted to talk to Eden. Representatives of supermarket weeklies and tabloid TV shows were giving Eden the full-tilt glam hustle. They wanted her life story. They wanted her predictions of coming world events. They were talking—to an answering machine—big money. Talking exclusivity.

Geoff was ever more aware that leaving Eden in his car and going off to assist in the emergency had been a huge mistake. He'd been shaken by calamity and was thinking
cop
, instead of concentrating on his real purpose. There was no way he could have anticipated a juggernaut like this so soon after the event. A bizarre, apocalyptic carnival had begun its colorful whirl around the image of Eden Waring. He was as surprised as anyone that she had "come out" so spectacularly. But that would be no excuse for muffing the unexpected opportunity. He had to come up with Eden, hopefully in a matter of hours. Fortunately she trusted him, almost as much as she trusted Betts and Riley.

Having listened to the Warings' incoming messages, it was time for him to review the day's outgoing calls. They had three lines in their home. Each of the Warings had a cell phone. Riley and Betts were professionals, so additional phones in their places of work had to be monitored. In days of yore, a decade or so in terms of technological breakthroughs, it would have meant deploying surveillance teams in listening posts and vans, a hell of a lot of cumbersome equipment. But the scanners and recorders that the government now had would fit inside a child's shoe box.

Because of the many trees around the Waring house and the cottage-style windows beneath a deep roof overhang, it had not been possible to employ lasers and eavesdrop on the Warings through the minute vibrations their voices initiated in the small glass panes. Geoff's unmanned listening post was a dry, roofed well at one corner of the large patio. In years past yellow jackets had built nests beneath the conical roof. None were in residence now. Geoff retrieved the microelectronic eavesdropping equipment he had stashed there, dropping by when no one was home to change tapes. There had never been bugs inside the house. Geoff knew that Betts had run a backgrounder on him, soon after he popped up in Eden's life. She used a small but prestigious agency in San Francisco. One of the partners was Betts's second cousin on her father's side, but it had not surprised Geoff to learn that the Frisco agency had ties to the Blackwelder organization. Which meant, to him, that Betts had the smarts and possibly the gadgets necessary to sweep her home and her office on a regular basis. She was, by profession, a keeper of secrets. No matter how miniaturized and cleverly concealed they were, micro-transmitters readily gave themselves away. Eliminating their use had made his job more difficult, but caution and patience always had been essential to Geoff McTyer's purpose.

Against his better judgment he left the house as he had found it, unlocked. The Warings might have made arrangements with a friend or another vet to pick up and board the dog. The Lab was nearly blind and too infirm to travel. Riley should have put Winky down by now, but Eden couldn't bear the thought.

After pocketing his spy gear Geoff gave the dog a parting rub behind the ears, thinking about Eden; before he knew it his eyes had teared and there was a definite lump in his throat.

Damn.
Damn
. He had been on this job too long. Now, abruptly, it was necessary to cancel all the cozy accommodations he had made with himself during his two and a half years in Innisfall.

They wouldn't leave the cleanup phase to him. No reflection on his competence. They knew he'd been intimate with Eden Waring. Necessary but dangerous emotional attachments had been wired in. Inevitable. Part of the long process. Anticipating, understanding this, they'd pull him out, send someone else to acquire or finalize the subject.

O
n the road fronting the Warings' four acres the crowd of hangers-on had multiplied. A thin cloud of dust had been raised by restless feet. A couple of teenage boys were selling cold drinks off the tailgate of their old rusty-orange Volvo station wagon. An Innisfall PD unit had arrived, two reserve police officers, to keep traffic moving. The media was still there, in force. The intrepid Diane Kopechne was interviewing someone, probably a neighbor. The woman had a fussbudget face. At the edge of the lights there was a mosaic of faces animated by crowd-hunger, a groundswell of mob esprit. They all wanted something that would consume them with awe. A statue weeping tears of blood, an oversized pumpkin on which the features of Elvis could be discerned. They drew strength from the presence of the media, which apportioned merit to their own idle questing.

Geoff saw a young girl cradling a goat kid in her arms.

He passed through the gate, locked it behind him. Walked through the crowd to his car, waving to one of the reservists. A hand plucked timidly at his sleeve. He looked around.

She had the look of prairie-dwelling women in old daguerreotypes: gaunt, windburnt, long-suffering, despising their fates.

"Did you see her, mister?"

Geoff stared at the woman, feeling hellishly tired, unable to focus on her question.

"What?"

"Did you see the miracle lady? She that saved them all when that plane fell out of the sky? Glory Hallelujah."

He shook his head. The woman wouldn't let go of him. She smiled with the blandness of deep-seated hysteria, or obsession.

"Course you seen her. You're her young
man
, is what they're sayin' here. Tell her we're all churchgoing people. Presbyterian, before we made the big switch back to the one true Gospel and speaking in tongues. Just passing through on our way to Sedona, Arizona, when we heard it on the radio. My husband's got a mighty lot of cancer in his bowel. It never does get done paining him. I have listened to his screams now four hundred mile. But we know the Lord is good.
Bless
the Lord.
Shabba walah aben obeth!
I ask you humbly, sir, have the miracle lady come out and strike this cancer from his body. Shouldn't take more than a minute of her time, and we surely would appreciate it."

"She's . . . not home. That's the truth. I don't know where . . . could you let go of me? I have to leave. I have to find Eden. I'm sorry for your trouble."

Her smile got bigger. It filled half her face. Her eyes nearly disappeared. Sweat drizzled down from her temples. She lost her grip on him, but when he moved away her hand remained in the air, resembling a weather-polished gnarl on a dead tree.

"Reckon we'll just wait right here till she does come. When you do see her you tell her, Al and Rosalie, they're a waitin'."

NEW YORK CITY • MAY 28 • 11:18 P.M. EDT

I
n the Presidential Suite of the Waldorf Astoria, President pro tempore Allen Dunbar looked up from the television set he was watching in their bedroom and said to his wife, "Look at this! Have you ever seen such caca in your life? Now what the heck do we get next, Saint Rona the First?" The image on the screen happened to be that of Rona Harvester on a solo visit to the Vatican, surrounded by photographers in a lovely shadow-dappled garden with the pontiff, who, in his billowy ecclesiastical robes, was holding fast to her elbow as if he were afraid of being lofted into the sky by a gust of wind. He smiled benignly at something Rona said. More file coverage, from her last overseas trip during the third week in April.

Dunbar got down from the side of the high-rise four-poster bed. Sitting there, his bare feet had been well off the floor. He was five-seven, almost five-nine when wearing shoes expensively designed to increase his stature without giving away the deception. He was a slight man with average looks that happened to photograph well, a must in his profession; an engaging cocksure grin; a lot of balls, physically and metaphorically. He had good negotiating skills facilitated by the ability to keep talking, for hours without a break, until the opposition wilted to the ground like crocuses in a late spring arctic gale. Good timing and better luck had elevated him from the Senate's equivalent of the utility infielder he'd been in college (not much bat but a hustler, a digger, good arm) to his present pro tern status. But Rona Harvester was determined to see he didn't get to enjoy a minute of it.

His wife Dorothea came out of the bedroom cold-creamed to the roots of her hair, wearing a half slip, and waited to see if she was expected to reply. Dunbar began to pace around the perimeter of the Napoleon III Aubusson carpet, four hundred square feet of it, rubbing his receding hairline in agitation.

"I mean, when the dickens is CNN going to stop chewing on this? And CBS. They canceled
everything
tonight.
Walker Texas Ranger
, for Pete's sake! Four solid hours of nothing but Rona Harvester."

"Well, they—"

"Sure, sure, I got on for a couple of minutes. Expressing my
outrage
, which believe me I was.
Out
raged. Not one mention of my address to the General Assembly. Jesse Jackson was interviewed for at least
five
minutes, and what does he have to do with anything? The President of the United States should
own
the tube at crunch time. My staff gets a well-deserved caning for this one. Forget about Jarrod and Tim, they're gone. If I don't have a good leadoff man, I won't be seeing anything but breaking balls when it's my turn at bat." He did an about-face on one corner of the carpet, appealing to his wife. "It isn't as if she was
ever
in any danger, Pug."

"You explained—"

"Can you believe the dog-gone
gall
of the woman?"

"Hard to believe," Dorothea said, with a slight cynical smile.

"Oh, she's behind it, all right. That's the preliminary word from Bob Hyde. Rona Harvester and, yes, I'll say it: her confederates at MORG. Where're you going?"

"Bathroom."

"Again? Been spending a lot of time in there, Pug. Another of your gastric upsets, is it? Stomach looks a little bloated. Have you been doing caca okay?"

"No."

He was going to follow her into the bathroom, but she closed the door. Dunbar stood just outside, head cocked, listening. Pausing to get his breath.

That little touch of emphysema, and he'd only smoked for a few years, because everybody else at prep did it, before giving up cigarettes on his thirtieth birthday. JFK had said it best. Life
was
unfair.

It was a thick door. He spoke more loudly.

"Not as if, anytime I wanted to, I couldn't put paid to her desperate little charade. Right? If Clint is in no condition to govern, ever again, which is the dope our team has been getting, then the American people ought to know. And I don't buy this 'crisis of confidence' stuff the House Whip is handing me. I told him today, 'Lorenzo, it's denigrating the American people to suggest that they won't get behind their new Chief one hundred percent, once they have the facts.' Of course the American people haven't warmed up to me yet. But hey. It's like the bottom of the ninth, two outs, the sacks are jammed and I'm pinch hitting for
Mark McGwire
. Have to be a realist, that's how I got this far. Perception is everything, in life and in politics. I just can't let myself be steam-rollered in the perception department 'cause of this little technicality of pro tem. I know what you're thinking. And you're on the beam, as always. It's a wait-and-see proposition." He paused to hear an affirmation, and frowned. "You all right in there, Puggums?"

There was suddenly a lot of activity in the bathroom, a noise like a submarine blowing its tubes.