In the vestibule, the artist had stood to the side of the open door, and Roy had stood next to him, both with their backs pressed to the wall, listening to the couple in the cellar below. The stairwell added a hollow note to the voices as it funneled them upward, but the words were nonetheless clear.
Roy had hoped to hear something that would explain the man’s connection with the woman, at least a crumb of information about the suspected conspiracy against the agency and the shadowy organization that he had mentioned to Steven in the gallery a few minutes ago. But they spoke only of the famous night sixteen years in the past.
Steven seemed amused to be eavesdropping on that of all possible conversations. He turned his head twice to smile at Roy, and once he raised one finger to his lips as if warning Roy to be quiet.
There was something of an imp in the artist, a playfulness that made him a good companion. Roy wished he didn’t have to return Steven to prison. But he could think of no way, in the currently delicate political climate of the country, to free the artist either openly or clandestinely. Dr. Sabrina Palma would again have her benefactor. The best Roy could hope for was that he would find other credible reasons to visit Steven from time to time or even to obtain temporary custody again for consultation in other field operations.
When the woman had whispered urgently to Grant—
Roy considered easing past the artist to the edge of the open door. He could try a shot to the head of the first person who came out of the stairwell.
But it might be Grant. He didn’t want to waste Grant until he had some answers from him. And if it was the woman who was shot dead on the spot, Steven wouldn’t be as motivated to help extract information from his son as he would be if he knew that he could look forward to bringing her to a state of angelic beauty.
Peach in. Green out.
Worse: Assuming that the pair below were still armed with the submachine gun they had used to destroy the stabilizer of the chopper in Cedar City, and assuming that the first one across the threshold would be armed with that piece, the risk of a confrontation at this juncture was too great. If Roy missed with his attempted head shot, the burst of return fire from the Micro Uzi would chop him and Steven to pieces.
Discretion seemed wise.
Roy touched the artist on the shoulder and gestured for him to follow. They could not quickly reach the open back of the cupboard and then slip through the pine cabinet doors into the room beyond, because to get there they would have to cross in front of the cellar stairs. Even if neither of the pair below was far enough up the stairs to see them, their passage through the center of the room, directly under the yellow light, would ensure that their darting shadows betrayed them. Instead, staying flat against the concrete blocks to avoid casting shadows into the room, they sidled away from the door to the wall directly opposite the entrance from the cupboard. They squeezed into the narrow space behind the displaced back wall of the cupboard, which Grant or the woman had rolled into the vestibule on a set of sliding-door tracks. That movable section was seven feet high and more than four feet wide. There was an eighteen-inch-wide hiding space between it and the concrete wall. Standing at an angle between them and the cellar door, it provided just enough cover.
If Grant or the woman or both of them came into the vestibule and crept to the gaping hole in the back wall of the cupboard, Roy could lean out from concealment and shoot one or both of them in the back, disabling rather than killing them.
If they came instead to look into the narrow space behind the dislocated guts of the cabinet, he would still have to try for a head shot before they opened fire.
Peach in. Green out.
He listened intently. Pistol in his right hand. Muzzle aimed at the ceiling.
He heard the stealthy scrape of a shoe on concrete. Someone had reached the top of the stairs.
Spencer remained at the bottom of the stairs. He wished that Ellie had given him a chance to go up there in her place.
Three steps from the top, she paused for perhaps half a minute, listening, then proceeded to the landing at the head of the stairs. She stood for a moment, silhouetted in the rectangle of yellow light from the upper room, framed in the blue light of the lower room, like a stark figure in a modernistic painting.
Spencer realized that Rocky had lost interest in the room above and had slipped away from his side. The dog was at the other side of the cellar, at the open gray door.
Above, Ellie crossed the threshold and stopped just inside the vestibule. She looked left and right, listening.
In the cellar, Spencer glanced at Rocky again. One ear pricked, head cocked, trembling, the dog peered warily into the passageway that led to the catacombs and on to the heart of the horror.
Speaking to Ellie, Spencer said, “Looks like fur face is just having a bad case of the heebie-jeebies.”
From the vestibule, she glanced down at him.
Behind him, Rocky whined.
“Now he’s at the other door, ready to make a puddle if I don’t keep looking at him.”
“Seems to be okay up here,” she said, and she descended the stairs again.
“The whole place spooks him, that’s all,” Spencer said. “My friend here is easily frightened by most new places. This time, of course, it’s with damned good reason.”
He engaged the safety on the pistol and again tucked it under the waistband of his jeans.
“He’s not the only one spooked,” Ellie said, shouldering the Uzi. “Let’s finish this.”
Spencer crossed the threshold again, from the cellar into the world beyond. With each step forward, he moved backward in time.
They left the VW Microbus on the street to which the man on the phone had directed Harris. Darius, Bonnie, and Martin walked with Harris, Jessica, and the girls across the adjacent park toward the beach a hundred and fifty yards away.
No one could be seen within the discs of light beneath the tall lampposts, but bursts of eerie laughter issued from the surrounding darkness. Above the rumble and slosh of the surf, Harris heard voices, fragmentary and strange, on all sides, near and far. A woman who sounded blitzed on something: “You’re a real catman, baby, really a catman, you are.” A man’s high-pitched laughter trilled through the night, from a place far to the north of the unseen woman. To the south, another man, old by the sound of him, sobbed with grief. Yet another unspottable man, with a pure young voice, kept repeating the same three words, as if chanting a mantra: “Eyes in tongues, eyes in tongues, eyes in tongues…” It seemed to Harris that he was shepherding his family across an openair Bedlam, through a madhouse with no roof other than palm fronds and night sky.
Homeless winos and crackheads lived in some of the lusher stands of shrubbery, in concealed cardboard boxes insulated with newspapers and old blankets. In the sunlight, the beach crowd moved in and the day was filled with well-tanned skaters and surfers and seekers of false dreams. Then the true residents wandered to the streets to make the rounds of trash bins, to panhandle, and to shamble on quests that only they could understand. But at night, the park belonged to them again, and the green lawns and the benches and the handball courts were as dangerous as any places on earth. In darkness, the deranged souls then ventured forth from the undergrowth to prey on one another. They were likely to prey, as well, on unwary visitors who incorrectly assumed that a park was public domain at any hour of the day.
It was no place for women and girls — unsafe for armed men, in fact — but it was the only quick route to the sand and to the foot of the old pier. At the pier stairs, they were to be met by someone who would take them on from there to the new life that they were so blindly embracing.
They had expected to wait. But even as they approached the dark structure, a man walked out of the shadows between those pilings that were still above the tide line. He joined them at the foot of the stairs.
Even with no lamppost nearby, with only the ambient light of the great city that hugged the shoreline, Harris recognized the man who had come for them. It was the Asian in the reindeer sweater, whom he had first encountered in the theater men’s room in Westwood earlier in the evening.
“Pheasants and dragons,” the man said, as though he was not sure that Harris could tell one Asian from
