quiet, but his taciturnity had no quality of inarticulateness or distraction. Quite the opposite: His silences spoke more than other men’s most polished flights of oratory, and he was always and unmistakably observant and alert. He moved little, never fidgeted. Occasionally, when he accompanied a comment with a gesture, the movement of his cuffed hands was so economical that the chain between his wrists clinked softly if at all. His stillness was not rigid but relaxed, not limp but full of quiescent power. It was impossible to sit at his side and be unaware that he possessed tremendous intelligence: He all but hummed with it, as if his mind was a dynamic machine of such omnipotence that it could move worlds and alter the cosmos.
In his entire thirty-three years, Roy Miro had met only two people whose mere physical presence had engendered in him an approximation of love. The first had been Eve Marie Jammer. The second was Steven Ackblom. Both in the same week. In this wondrous February, destiny had become, indeed, his cloak and his companion. He sat at Steven Ackblom’s side, discreetly enthralled. He wanted desperately to make the artist aware that he, Roy Miro, was a person of profound insights and exceptional accomplishments.
Rink and Fordyce (Tarkenton and Olmeyer had ceased to exist upon leaving Dr. Palma’s office) seemed not to be as charmed by Ackblom as Roy was — or charmed at all. Sitting in the rear-facing seats, they appeared uninterested in what the artist had to say. Fordyce closed his eyes for long periods of time, as though meditating. Rink stared out the window, although he could have seen nothing whatsoever of the night through the darkly tinted glass. On those rare occasions when a gesture of Ackblom’s rang a soft clink from his cuffs, and on those even rarer occasions when he shifted his feet enough to rattle the shackles that connected his ankles, Fordyce’s eyes popped open like the counterbalanced eyes of a doll, and Rink’s head snapped from the unseen night to the artist. Otherwise they seemed to pay no attention to him.
Depressingly, Rink and Fordyce clearly had formed their opinions of Ackblom based on what drivel they had gleaned from the media, not from what they could observe for themselves. Their denseness was no surprise, of course. Rink and Fordyce were men not of ideas but of action, not of passion but of crude desire. The agency had need of their type, although they were sadly without vision, pitiable creatures of woeful limitations who would one day inch the world closer to perfection by departing it.
“At the time, I was quite young, only two years older than your son,” Roy said, “but I understood what you were trying to achieve.”
“And what was that?” Ackblom asked. His voice was in the lower tenor range, mellow, with a timbre that suggested he might have had a career as a singer if he’d wished.
Roy explained his theories about the artist’s work: that those eerie and compelling portraits weren’t about people’s hateful desires building like boiler pressure beneath their beautiful surfaces, but were meant to be viewed
Roy was speaking sincerely, although previously he had believed that Ackblom had been misguided in the means by which he had pursued the grail of perfection. That was before he had met the man. Now, he felt ashamed of his woeful underestimation of the artist’s talent and keen perception.
In the rear-facing seats, neither Rink nor Fordyce evinced any surprise or interest in anything that Roy said. In their service with the agency, they had heard so many outrageous lies, all so well and sincerely delivered, that they undoubtedly believed their boss was only playing with Ackblom, cleverly manipulating a madman into the degree of cooperation required from him to ensure the success of the current operation. Roy was in the singular and thrilling position of being able to express his deepest feelings, with the knowledge that Ackblom would fully comprehend him even while Rink and Fordyce would think he was engaged only in Machiavellian games.
Roy did not go so far as to reveal his personal commitment to compassionate treatment of the sadder cases that he met in his many travels. Stories like those about the Bettonfields in Beverly Hills, Chester and Guinevere in Burbank, and the paraplegic and his wife outside the restaurant in Vegas might strike even Rink and Fordyce as too specific in detail to be impromptu fabrications invented to win the artist’s confidence.
“The world would be an infinitely better place,” Roy opined, restricting his observations to safely general concepts, “if the breeding stock of humanity was thinned out. Eliminate the most imperfect specimens first. Always working up from the bottom. Until those permitted to survive are the people who most closely meet the standards for the ideal citizens needed to build a gentler and more enlightened society. Don’t you agree?”
“The process would certainly be fascinating,” Ackblom replied.
Roy took the comment to be approving. “Yes, wouldn’t it?”
“Always supposing that one was on the committee of eliminators,” the artist said, “and not among those to be judged.”
“Well, of course, that’s a given.”
Ackblom favored him with a smile. “Then what fun.”
They were driving over the mountains on Interstate 70, rather than flying to Vail. The trip would require less than two hours by car. Returning across Denver from the prison to Stapleton, waiting for flight clearance, and making the journey by air would actually have taken longer. Besides, the limousine was more intimate and quieter than the jet. Roy was able to spend more quality time with the artist than he would have been able to enjoy in the Lear.
Gradually, mile by mile, Roy Miro came to understand why Steven Ackblom affected him as powerfully as Eve had affected him. Although the artist was a handsome man, nothing about his physical appearance could qualify as a perfect feature. Yet in some way, he
The limousine cruised into ever higher mountains, through vast primeval forests encrusted with snow, upward into silvery moonlight — all of which the tinted windows reduced to a smoky blur. The tires hummed.
While Spencer drove the stolen black pickup east on Interstate 70 out of Grand Junction, Ellie slumped in her seat and worked feverishly on the laptop, which she had plugged into the cigarette lighter. The computer was elevated on a pillow that they had filched from the motel. Periodically she consulted a printout of the parcel map and other information that she had obtained about the ranch.
“What’re you doing?” he asked again.
“Calculations.”
“What calculations?”
“Ssshhhhh. Rocky’s sleeping on the backseat.”
From her duffel bag, she had produced diskettes of software which she’d installed in the machine. Evidently they were programs of her own design, adapted to his laptop while he had lingered in delirium for more than two days in the Mojave. When he had asked her why she had backed up her own computer — now gone with the Rover — with his quite different system, she had said, “Former Girl Scout. Remember? We always like to be prepared.”
He had no idea what her software allowed her to do. Across the screen flickered formulas and graphs. Holographic globes of the earth revolved at her command, and from them she extracted areas for enlargement and closer examination.
Vail was only three hours away. Spencer wished that they could use the time to talk, to discover more about each other. Three hours was such a short time — especially if it proved to be the last three hours they ever had together.
FOURTEEN
When he returned to his brother’s house from his walk through the hilly streets of Westwood, Harris
