The Fury and the Terror Page 9

  "Her mirror image. But only a double, unless she chose to give it a life of its own. Gillian told me it could be done merely by bestowing an alternate name on the dpg. She also said that it was a dangerous practice."

  "I think it's likely that Robin Sandza's doppelganger, named or unnamed, visited Gilly, at that time when she was just home from the hospital and inexperienced, unguarded. Too trusting. He, or it, visited and may have seduced my daughter. Once I learned that she was pregnant, I consulted psychics. Having become a believer. They all agreed that there is sexual intercourse in the Astral, but they disagreed that conception can occur. Could a doppelganger father a human child? No answers."

  "But they are, supposedly, exact replicas of their homebodies. Who does this girl named Eden look like?"

  "She favors Gillian, thank God."

  "Gillian had powers beyond our comprehension. If Robin Sandza was Eden's father, what must she be like? She could be—what? A savior—"

  "Other psychics call the rare ones 'Avatars.'"

  "Infinite in faculty. In apprehension how like a god."

  Sherard paused, silenced by implications. Katharine made of his stillness an opportunity, moving from her seat to sit on the floor by him. Fluid in movement in spite of her years. The disciplines of yoga and the StairMaster, tennis on weekends. She put a forearm across his knees, her head resting on her arm, pose of subjugation. Contrived, of course, but not unpleasant. Her artifice a corollary of privilege.

  "And you gave the child up for adoption."

  "I had to. I chose her adoptive parents very carefully, culling the candidates from nearly every state, Canada, Europe. They had to have the education, experience, and emotional security to deal with a prodigy. Since Eden went to live in California as an infant I haven't seen her, except in photographs. I wanted her to have every opportunity to lead a comfortable, conventional life in a Cheez Whiz kind of town. She's very intelligent, of course. Quite the athlete. So am I. It became obvious, early on, that Eden inherited Gillian's ability to travel in the astral. Her dreams, she was told, were actually journeys out of the body. According to her adoptive mother, who is a clinical psychologist, Eden's visits to the astral have been under the supervision of a third, surrogate mother, whom Eden named the Good Lady."

  "Why do you think she's in danger now?"

  "Unfortunately she 'came out' in front of several thousand people at her college graduation exercise two hours ago. It was, still is, on all the national news channels. Eden was about to deliver her valedictory address. Suddenly she warned everyone to leave the stadium where they were assembled. She told them a plane was about to crash there."

  Sherard vaguely remembered seeing something about this on a television in the British Airways lounge. Right now he longed for another scotch. The limousine might have had a bar tucked away in some ingeniously discreet compartment, but a drink hadn't been offered and he wouldn't ask.

  "Saved nearly everyone with her timely warning. So Eden 'saw' it happening before it happened?"

  "Of course."

  He touched the back of Katharine's lax small hand, tracing a vein there. Her skin was still remarkably supple, unblemished.

  "Where is she now?"

  "No idea. For many reasons I can't, don't wish to directly contact her adoptive parents."

  "MORG again?" Sherard asked.

  "You know what they are. How bitterly I've fought them. They watch me constantly. Victor Wilding still must believe that because of Gillian, I have connections to the psychic underground."

  "Do you?"

  Her eyes moved away from his.

  "I'm not watched anymore," Sherard said. "They never took me very seriously. I was Gillian's white-hunter husband, found a cushy thing for himself with the profession dying out, the hunting bans and tribal wars. Otherwise I should have died on the sidewalk beside Gilly."

  "How do you know you're not watched?"

  "Bush sense."

  "You're probably wrong."

  "It's my legs that are damaged, not my instincts."

  "Regardless, please do this my way."

  "What is it you want, Katharine?"

  "Find Eden. Bring her home to me. I'm so very anxious to get to know Eden, after all these years."

  "Find her?"

  "Betts and Riley Waring have long known what to do for Eden in the event MORG learned about her." There was a gleam of hazard in Katharine's eyes as she looked at Sherard. "In spite of all the precautions Avery and I took, I'm sure Victor Wilding has long held suspicions that there was a child. Through yoga I've always been able to block the MMF." Katharine used the short reference for what was known to the activists in the psychic underground as MORG Mind-Fuckers. "Gillian must have taught you similar techniques."

  Sherard nodded. "She described it as 'not leaving footprints in the air.'"

  "You were on your way to London? Good. Get on that plane, then get off. I'll make those arrangements. United is holding space on the six o'clock to San Francisco under your old alias."

  "G. W. Hunter?" He and Gillian had usually traveled under assumed names, because of her activities, and because she was a member of one of the richest families on earth.

  "I assumed your British passport in that name is still valid. And you have it with you."

  "Yes, but—"

  "Good. No footprints in the air. I'll contact you tomorrow at the Blackwelder office in San Francisco. Ten sharp. By then I'll have heard from Betts Waring."

  "It's the Blackwelder organization you ought to be using, not me. Vaughn Blackwelder has been devoted to you for years. Don't understand why you haven't married him."

  "Hairpieces. He has a dressing room with a dozen hairpieces sitting on white foam heads. It does something to the soul. I can't have Vaughn and his group handle this matter. It must be you."

  "Why?"

  "Eden knows she's adopted. She was never told who her mother was. You were Gillian's husband for twelve years. Everything that Eden will want to know about Gilly you can tell her. Eden is subject to seizures, a consequence of her phenomenal abilities. My principal concern is not to frighten her. And you do have a way with women, Tom."

  "Thank you."

  "No, that was from the heart. You truly like us. Most straight men your age are sexual provocateurs. Those who aren't outright creeps. You're what your contours say you are. Stalwart. I love that word. A hunter, a provider, a companion. You're wounded now. Doesn't matter. There's still a sense of completeness about you. No trivialities. Staunch. Another good word from the chivalric days of manhood. But you have no bent for obsessive, despairing relationships and quaint romantic afflictions. Always up front with your loyalties. A woman's man. We all want to be that woman."

  "God Almighty."

  "Don't you see? Eden will trust you. She'll come with you. No questions."

  "You're asking too much. I don't think I can do this."

  "But you will. Won't you? And now you know why. You'll do it for Gillian."

  CHAPTER 9

  CAMP DAVID, MARYLAND • MAY 28 • 6:44 P.M. EDT

  Clint Harvester was having dinner with his personal physician, two neurological specialists from Johns Hopkins Medical Center, and the White House Chief of Staff in the President's lodge at Camp David when word came from Honolulu that the First Lady's motorcade had been ambushed on the way to the airport.

  Drexel R. "Pep" Slingbury, Princeton '79, took the call. They had been watching NBC's Weekend News. While Pep pressed for details and scribbled notes on a linen napkin with a ballpoint pen, the second-string anchorman, interrupted by something that wasn't on the teleprompter crawl in front of him, hesitated, looked startled, then found his sonorous voice again and relayed the news to the network's viewers. Coverage supplied by the NBC affiliate in the fiftieth state flashed on the screen. The cameraman seemed to be covering the scene from the roof of an office building, perhaps half a mile away.

  A smoking but upright limousine was sitting sideways in the middle of Ala Moana
Boulevard, surrounded by fire and emergency vehicles and helmeted cops. There was rubble in the roadway. A palm tree, set ablaze by a rocket, was being hosed down by the fire department. Another heavily damaged car was on the curb at least a hundred feet away from the armored limo. They had pulled injured MORG agents out of this one. All of the limousine doors hung open. The press corps accompanying the First Lady was herded back into the vans by machine gun-toting MORG agents. Traffic on the busy boulevard was backed up for half a mile in either direction. There was no audio feed from Hawaii. The NBC anchor attempted his own uninformed commentary.

  Pep Slingbury was ahead of NBC on the facts, which he blurted out as they came to him.

  "Helicopter ... popped up out of nowhere. Four men with automatic weapons, RPGs, maybe a Stinger ... no, that's unconfirmed. Knew exactly what they were ... they hit the counterassault team's vehicle first, then the FLOTUS limo. Two tires shredded but it's operational. The package is approaching the airport now. Yes? Yes? ... the President's right here, he's standing by here ... yes ... Harry, you're breaking up ... as soon as you fucking know, God damn it!"

  Clint Harvester had pushed his chair back a couple of inches from the table. He still had his spoon in his hand. He ate everything with a red plastic tablespoon, or his fingers. He was subject to clonuses, and could injure himself with a knife or a fork. He slowly chewed a mouthful of buttered croissant, watching the TV screen with a bland unblinking eye.

  Paul Luckett, Deputy Chief of the Secret Service's presidential detail, came in fast with six more agents, who took up prearranged positions around the Chief Executive, code-named "Rawhide," hands on the Glocks and M-l6s they wore under their coats. Two DoD communications specialists appeared with secure telephones, Swedish-made, unbreakable cryptology scattered across a dozen channels.

  "Mr. President," Pep said with a grimace of apology, "there could be more to this than Honolulu."

  Clint Harvester looked around at Paul Luckett and grinned, gave him a merry thumbs-up, and pushed the rest of his croissant into his mouth. Paul Luckett grinned back, looked pained, looked at the Chief of Staff, who was using one of the secure phones to call the White House press secretary at home.

  "I think this makes my case, Mr. Slingbury. What I've been saying all along."

  "Yeah, Paul."

  Luckett gestured at the TV. "No way this happens if we're protecting Zephyr."

  "And there's no way Dallas could've happened to Kennedy, isn't that right, Paul?" Pep reached for the napkin he'd been writing on, remembering his notes only after he'd left smears of ink on his high perspiring forehead. "Hi, Moira. Got the TV on? No? Turn it on. Where's Cody, outside mowing the south forty? Page him for me, please."

  Luckett keyed his walkie, began checking perimeter security at Camp David, which he referred to as "Cactus." Already there were heavily armed helicopters in the air around the mountain retreat, two teams of counterassault Marines deploying on the grounds.

  Now on the dining-room projection TV there was an image of the President's 747, redesignated as Special Air Mission Z-1815 when Rona was using it, at the Honolulu airport and at least a mile from the camera. The limousine carrying Rona Harvester rolled toward the plane with two mangled tires designed to keep going even if they were flat. Police cars and motorcycle cops surrounded the limo. An Air Police SWAT team had arrived by helo from the adjacent Hickam Air Force Base to beef up security.

  The shot-up but probably unpenetrated armored limousine stopped below the stairway. In a mob of security men Rona Harvester was removed from the limo and hustled through the glitter of a Hawaiian afternoon to the forward door of the immense airplane, all but invisible within the moving human shield. Clouds above the 747 were like a thick pile of whipped cream on a banana split. Two more men with machine guns stood in the doorway. All of this was being witnessed around the world as it happened, commercial-free. Images that would be repeated endlessly for the rest of the night in the U.S.

  Rona Harvester hesitated at the doorway, seeming to resist efforts to hastily shove her inside. Saying something, gesturing. Back off, please. Unbowed, undaunted. She turned slightly, toward the terminal. She knew where the cameras would be. Was that a smear of blood on her forehead? Rona raised her right fist, double-pumping, knocking air, a gesture of defiance and victory.

  "The little devil," Pep Slingbury said quietly, willing, for the moment, to suspend his dislike of the woman most responsible for his peptic ulcer.

  Then she was gone. Safely inside SAM Z-1815, the door closing. As the mobile staircase was driven away the 747 began to move. The face of the NBC anchor reappeared, picture within a picture. He spoke movingly, with a firm jaw and admiration glinting in his eyes, of Rona Harvester's courage under fire, her popularity with the American people. While the 747 was taxiing for takeoff the network ran a file montage of Rona, highlights of her years at the White House. Touring areas of the U.S. that had been devastated by natural disasters. Floating a wreath, well upriver from the hot zone, for the dead and displaced of Portland, Oregon. Chairing important conferences on the humanitarian deficiencies of third-world nations. Visiting schools. Chumming with crowned heads at White House dinners. Horseback riding with her husband on their Montana ranch, her windblown hair back-lighted by a ravishing sunset.

  Everyone in the room, including the Secret Service agents, had momentarily forgotten about Clint Harvester.

  He was sitting forward on the edge of his high-backed chair. His left hand, holding the big red plastic spoon, rested on an arm of the chair. With his other hand he had unzipped his pleated honey-colored corduroy slacks and was peeing on the Navaho rug in front of him. His lower lip pushed in and out, ruminatively. His upper lip had a buttery, crumbed gleam. His active mind, what little remained of it, was somewhere else. His eyes were as still as swatted flies.

  Now everyone in the room had noticed. Pep swallowed a desperate urge to bray like a donkey, shoot himself in the foot, do anything to divert attention from this humiliation of a man he happened to love. His heart gave a frightful twitch. Sweat blurred his vision.

  But at least, Pep thought, they had progressed to a point where the leader and hope of the free world was taking it out before he obeyed the urge to relieve himself. So the news wasn't all bad tonight, was it?

  CHAPTER 10

  INNISFALL, CALIFORNIA • MAY 28 • 7:26 P.M. PDT

  Geoff McTyer had LoJack. It was no trouble for him to locate his car, parked near the top of the hill in the Memorial Gardens. One of the campus cops gave him a lift up there. He checked first to see if the Taurus had been hot-wired. No. He stood beside his car for a while, clothes grimy and stained with sweat, looking north with tired eyes to the Cal Shasta campus. It was dusk. The last light of the sun gleamed opaquely in the many windows of the school buildings. Lights had come on in the parking lots and along the winding drives. Except for the hulks of the burned-out airliner in and near the stadium, it was like any other balmy evening in late spring. There was rain farther off, to the north and east. Twenty-five, thirty miles away. Lightning flared within the heavy cloud formations.

  The charnel reek of burnt flesh was all over him. A bath would help, but probably he'd continue to smell it in his sleep. For several nights to come. At least the poor bastards—they'd found seventeen shrunken bodies in the wreckage, many of them resembling charcoal mummies with shiny dabs of silver and gold jewelry embedded where ears, wrists, and throats had been—should have died on impact. A survivor who had been taken to the hospital hours ago probably was still in surgery. Geoff ate some dried apricots to boost his energy level and wondered how Eden had managed to drive the Taurus to the cemetery without the ignition key that was in the leather folder chained to his belt.

  Maybe she'd had it towed, as a joke. But she hadn't been in a jolly frame of mind when he'd last seen her.

  He took his cell phone from the trunk, tried to reach Eden. Three different numbers, including her pager. He left a message, but after ten minutes she hadn't
called him back.

  Where are you, baby?

  Geoff got in the car. Needing the evening wind to air him out, he drove with the top down to the Warings' house on Deep Creek Road.

  The sun was setting when he got there, a golden sky with birds flocking to the treetops like iron filings to a magnet. The merely curious were hanging out along the road with journalists from all of the important media. The journalists looked bored and disgruntled, as if they'd been stood up by blind dates. A chained and padlocked gate blocked the drive. Riley had procrastinated getting the electronic gate opener fixed. But Geoff had a padlock key. He got out of the Taurus with his shield in his hand.

  The vid crews came at him with their usual dog-pack intensity, a brute assault with lights, cameras, microphones. They yelled questions from all sides as he walked to the gate.

  Geoff turned and said, "I want every one of you two hundred feet back from the driveway entrance! Move your vehicles now or there'll be tow trucks out here in fifteen minutes."

  A young woman wearing a lot of makeup trampled one of her slower-moving colleagues in order to get in Geoff's face with her microphone.

  "Diane Kopechne, Channel Nine News at Seven. Why have the police been called? Has something happened here?"