had used the secure phone in the disabled helicopter to order two more customized JetRangers out of Las Vegas, but the agency had only one more at that office to send him. “Jesus,” Ken Hyckman had said, “you’re going through choppers like they’re Kleenex.” Roy would be continuing the pursuit of the woman and Grant with only nine of his twelve men, which was the maximum number that could be packed into the one new craft.
Although the disabled JetRanger wouldn’t be repaired and able to take off from behind the Hallmark store for at least thirty-six hours, the new chopper was already out of Vegas and on its way to Cedar City. Earthguard was being retargeted to track the stolen aircraft. They had suffered a setback, no argument about that, but the situation was by no means an unmitigated disaster. One battle lost — even one
He wasn’t calmed by inhaling the pale-peach vapor of tranquility and exhaling the bile-green vapor of rage and frustration. He found no comfort in any of the other meditative techniques that for years had worked so reliably. Only one thing kept his counterproductive anger in check: thinking about Eve Jammer in all her glorious sixty- percent perfection. Nude. Oiled. Writhing. Blond splendor on black rubber.
The new helicopter wouldn’t reach Cedar City until past noon, but Roy was confident of being able to tough out the Mormons until then. Under their watchful eyes, he wandered among them, answered their questions again and again, examined the contents of the Rover, tagged everything in the vehicle for impoundment, and all the while his head was filled with images of Eve pleasuring herself with her perfect hands and with a variety of devices that had been designed by sexually obsessed inventors whose creative genius exceeded that of Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein combined.
As he was standing at a supermarket checkout counter, examining the computer and the file box of twenty software diskettes that had been removed from the back of the Range Rover, Roy remembered Mama. For one frantic moment of denial, he tried to delude himself into remembering that he had switched off or unplugged the attache case computer before he had departed the chopper. No good. He could see the video display as it had been when he’d put the workstation on the deck beside his seat before he had hurried to the cockpit: the satellite look- down on the shopping center.
“Holy
Roy raced to the back of the supermarket, through the stockroom, out the rear door, through the milling strike force agents and cops, to the damaged helicopter, where he could use the secure phone with its scrambling device.
He called Las Vegas and reached Ken Hyckman in the satellite-surveillance center. “We’ve got trouble —”
Even as Roy started to explain, Hyckman talked over him with pompous ex-anchorman solemnity: “We have trouble here. Earthguard’s onboard computer crashed. It inexplicably went off the air. We’re working on it, but we —”
Roy interrupted, because he knew the woman must have used his VDT to take out Earthguard. “Ken, listen, my field computer was in that stolen chopper, and it was on-line with Mama.”
“Holy shit!” Ken Hyckman said, but in the satellite-surveillance center, there were no Mormon cops to twitch.
“Get on with Mama, have her cut off my unit and block it from ever reaccessing her.
The JetRanger chattered eastward across Utah, flying as low as one hundred feet above ground level where possible, to avoid radar detection.
Rocky remained with Ellie after Spencer went forward to oversee the crew again. She was too intensely focused on learning as much as she could about Mama’s capabilities to be able to pet the pooch or even talk at him a little. His unrewarded company seemed to be a touching and welcome indication that he had come to trust and approve of her.
She might as well have smashed the VDT and spent the time giving the dog a good scratch behind the ears, because before she was able to accomplish anything, the data on the video display vanished and was replaced by a blue field. A question flashed at her in red letters against the blue: WHO GOES THERE?
This development was no surprise. She had expected to be cut off long before she could do any damage to Mama. The system was designed with elaborate redundancies, protections against hacker penetrations, and virus vaccines. Finding a route into Mama’s deep program-management level, where major destruction could be wrought, would require not merely hours of diligent probing but days. Ellie had been fortunate to have the time necessary to take out Earthguard, for she could never have achieved such total control of the satellite without Mama’s assistance. To attempt not merely to use Mama but to bloody her nose had been overreaching. Nevertheless, doomed as the effort was, Ellie had been obliged to try.
When she had no answer for the red-letter question, the screen went blank and changed from blue to gray. It looked dead. She knew there was no point in trying to reacquire Mama.
She unplugged the computer, put it in the aisle beside her seat, and reached for the dog. He wiggled to her, lashing his tail. As she bent forward to pet him, she noticed a manila envelope on the deck, half under her seat.
After petting and scratching the pooch for a minute or two, Ellie retrieved the envelope from under the seat. It contained four photographs.
She recognized Spencer in spite of how very young he was in the snapshots. Although the man was visible in the boy, he had lost more than youth since the days when those pictures had been taken. More than innocence. More than the effervescent spirit that seemed evident in the smile and body language of the child. Life also had stolen an ineffable quality from him, and the loss was no less apparent for being inexpressible.
Ellie studied the woman’s face in the two pictures that showed her with Spencer, and was convinced that they were mother and son. If appearances didn’t deceive — and in this instance she sensed that they did not — Spencer’s mother had been gentle, kind, soft-spoken, with a girlish sense of fun.
In a third photo, the mother was younger than in the two with Spencer, perhaps twenty, standing alone in front of a tree laden with white flowers. She appeared to be radiantly innocent, not naive but unspoiled and without cynicism. Maybe Ellie was reading too much into a photo, but she perceived in Spencer’s mother a vulnerability so poignant that suddenly tears welled in her eyes.
Squinting, biting her lower lip, determined not to weep, she was at last forced to wipe her eyes with the heel of her hand. She wasn’t moved solely by Spencer’s loss. Staring at the woman in the summer dress, she thought of her own mother, taken from her so brutally.
Ellie stood on the shore of a warm sea of memories, but she couldn’t bathe in the comfort of them. Every wave of recollection, regardless of how innocent it seemed, broke on the same dark beach. Her mother’s face, in every recaptured moment of the past, was as it had been in death: bloodied, bullet-shattered, with a fixed gaze so full of horror that it seemed as if, at the penultimate moment, the dear woman had glimpsed what lay beyond this world and had seen only a cold, vast emptiness.
Shivering, Ellie turned her eyes away from the snapshot to the starboard porthole beside her seat. The blue sky was as forbidding as an icy sea, and close beneath the low-flying craft passed a meaningless blur of rock, vegetation, and human endeavor.
When she was certain that she was in control of her emotions, Ellie looked again at the woman in the summer dress — and then at the final of the four photographs. She had noted aspects of the mother in the son, but she saw a much greater resemblance between Spencer and the shadow-shrouded man in the fourth picture. She knew this had to be his father, even though she didn’t recognize the infamous artist.
The resemblance, however, was limited to the dark hair, darker eyes, the shape of the chin, and a few other features. In Spencer’s face, there was none of the arrogance and potential for cruelty that made his father appear to be so cold and forbidding.
Or perhaps she saw those things in Steven Ackblom only because she knew that she was gazing at a monster. If she had come upon the photo without reason to suspect who the man was — or if she had met him in life, at a party or on the street — she might have seen nothing about him that made him more ominous than Spencer or other men.
Ellie was immediately sorry that such a thought had occurred to her, for it encouraged her to wonder if the
