Descoteaux did not mention the encounter with the tall man in the blue Toyota. For one thing, it seemed half like a dream. Improbable. Besides, he hadn’t been able to make up his mind whether that stranger had been a friend or an enemy. He didn’t want to alarm Darius or Jessica.
Late that afternoon, after Ondine and Willa returned from the mall with their aunt and after Darius and Bonnie’s son, Martin, came home from school, Darius decided that they needed to have a little fun. He insisted on packing everyone — the seven of them — into the VW Microbus, which he had so lovingly restored with his own hands, to go to a movie and then to dinner at Hamlet Gardens.
Neither Harris nor Jessica wanted to go to movies and dinners in restaurants when every dollar spent was a dollar that they were mooching. Not even Ondine and Willa, as resilient as any teenagers, had yet bounced back from the trauma of the SWAT attack on Friday or from having been put out of their own home by federal marshals.
Darius was adamant that a movie and dinner at Hamlet Gardens were precisely the right medicines for what ailed them. And his persistence was one of the qualities that made him an exceptional attorney.
That was how, at six-fifteen Monday evening, Harris came to be in a theater with a boisterous crowd, unable to grasp the humor in scenes that everyone else found hilarious, and succumbing to another attack of claustrophobia. The darkness. So many people in one room. The body heat of the crowd. He was afflicted, first, by an inability to draw a deep breath and then by a mild dizziness. He feared that worse would swiftly follow. He whispered to Jessica that he had to use the bathroom. When worry crossed her face, he patted her arm and smiled reassuringly, and then he got the hell out of there.
The men’s room was deserted. At one of the four sinks, Harris turned on the cold water. He bent over the bowl and splashed his face repeatedly, trying to cool down from the overheated theater and chase away the dizziness.
The noise of the running water prevented him from hearing the other man enter. When he looked up, he was no longer alone.
About thirty, Asian, wearing loafers and jeans and a dark-blue sweater with prancing red reindeer, the stranger stood two sinks away. He was combing his hair. He met Harris’s eyes in the mirror, and he smiled. “Sir, may I give you something to think about?”
Harris recognized the question as the very one with which the tall man in the blue Toyota had initially addressed him. Startled, he backed away from the sink so fast that he crashed against the swinging door at one of the toilet stalls. He tottered, almost fell, but caught the hingeless side of the jamb to keep his balance.
“For a while the Japanese economy was so hot that it gave the world the idea that maybe big government and big business must work hand in glove.”
“Who are you?” Harris asked, quicker off the mark with this man than he had been with the first.
Ignoring the question, the smiling stranger said, “So now we hear about national industrial policies. Big business and government strike deals every day. Push my social programs and enhance my power, says the politician, and I’ll guarantee your profit.”
“What does any of this matter to me?”
“Be patient, Mr. Descoteaux.”
“But—”
“Union members get screwed because government conspires with their bosses. Small businessmen get screwed, everyone too little to play in the hundred-billion-dollar league. Now the secretary of defense wants to use the military as an arm of economic policy.”
Harris returned to the sink, where he had left the cold water running. He turned it off.
“A business-government alliance, enforced by the military and domestic police — once, this was called fascism. Will we see fascism in our time, Mr. Descoteaux? Or is this something new, not to worry?”
Harris was trembling. He realized that his face and hands were dripping, and he yanked paper towels from the dispenser.
“And if it’s something new, Mr. Descoteaux, is it going to be something good? Maybe. Maybe we’ll go through a time of adjustment, and thereafter everything will be delightful.” He nodded, smiling, as if considering that possibility. “Or maybe this new thing will turn out to be a new kind of hell.”
“I don’t care about any of this,” Harris said angrily. “I’m not political.”
“You don’t need to be. To protect yourself, you need only to be informed.”
“Look, whoever you are, I just want my house back. I want my life like it was. I want to go on just the way everything was.”
“That will never transpire, Mr. Descoteaux.”
“Why is this happening to me?”
“Have you read the novels of Philip K. Dick, Mr. Descoteaux?”
“Who? No.”
Harris felt more than ever as if he had crossed into White Rabbit and Cheshire Cat territory.
The stranger shook his head with dismay. “The futuristic world Mr. Dick wrote about is the world we’re sliding into. It’s a scary place, this Dicksian world. More than ever, a person needs friends.”
“Are you a friend?” Harris demanded. “Who are you people?”
“Be patient and consider what I’ve said.”
The man started for the door.
Harris reached out to stop him but decided against it. A moment later he was alone.
His bowels were suddenly in turmoil. He hadn’t lied to Jessica after all: He really did need to use the bathroom.
Approaching Vail, high in the western Rockies, Roy Miro used the phone in the limousine to call the number of the cellular unit that Gary Duvall had given him earlier.
“Clear?” he asked.
“No sign of them yet,” Duvall said.
“We’re almost there.”
“You really think they’re going to show?”
The stolen JetRanger and its crew had been found in the Colorado National Monument. A call from the woman to the Grand Junction police had been traced to Montrose, indicating that she and Spencer Grant were fleeing south toward Durango. Roy didn’t believe it. He knew that telephone calls could be deceptively routed with the assistance of a computer. He trusted not in a traced call but in the power of the past; where the past and the present met, he would find the fugitives.
“They’ll show,” Roy said. “Cosmic forces are with us tonight.”
“Cosmic forces?” Duvall said, as if playing into a joke, waiting for the punch line.
“They’ll show,” Roy repeated, and he disconnected.
Beside Roy, Steven Ackblom sat silent and serene.
“We’ll be there in just a few minutes,” Roy told him.
Ackblom smiled. “There’s no place like home.”
Spencer had been driving for nearly an hour and a half before Ellie switched off the computer and unplugged it from the cigarette lighter. A dew of perspiration beaded her forehead, although the interior of the truck was not overheated.
“God knows if I’m mounting a good defense or planning a double suicide,” she said. “Could go either way. But now it’s there for us to use if we have to.”
“Use what?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” she said bluntly. “It’ll take too much time. Besides, you’d try to talk me out of it. Which would be a waste of time. I know the arguments against it, and I’ve already rejected them.”
“And this makes an argument so much easier — when you handle both sides of it.”
She remained somber. “If worse comes to worst, I’ll have no choice but to use it, no matter how insane that seems.”
Rocky had awakened in the backseat a short while ago, and to him, Spencer said, “Pal, you’re not confused back there, are you?”
