his trip.
The closet door stood open. A few shirts, jeans, and chinos hung from the wooden rod, but half the hangers were empty.
One by one, Roy pulled out the drawers on a highboy. They contained a few items of clothing — mostly socks and underwear. A belt. One green sweater, one blue.
Even the contents of a large suitcase, if returned to the drawers, would not have filled them. Therefore, Grant had either packed two or more suitcases — or his clothing and home-decorating budgets were equally frugal.
“Any signs of a dog?” Roy asked.
Johnson shook his head. “Not that I noticed.”
“Look around, inside and out,” Roy ordered, leaving the bedroom.
Three members of the SWAT team, men with whom Roy had not worked before, were standing in the living room. They were tall, beefy guys. In that confined space, their protective gear, combat boots, and bristling weapons made them appear to be even larger than they were. With no one to shoot or subdue, they were as awkward and uncertain as professional wrestlers invited to tea with the octogenarian members of a ladies’ knitting club.
Roy was about to send them outside when he saw that the screen was lit on one of the computers in the array of electronic equipment that covered the surface of an L-shaped corner desk. White letters glowed on a blue background.
“Who turned that on?” he asked the three men.
They gazed at the computer, baffled.
“Must’ve been on when we came in,” one of them said.
“Wouldn’t you have noticed?”
“Maybe not.”
“Grant must’ve left in a hurry,” said another.
Alfonse Johnson, just entering the room, disagreed: “It wasn’t on when I came through the front door. I’d bet anything.”
Roy went to the desk. On the computer screen was the same number repeated three times down the center:
31
31
31
Suddenly the numbers changed, beginning at the top, continuing slowly down the column, until all were the same:
32
32
32
Simultaneously with the appearance of the third thirty-two, a soft
The numbers changed from top to bottom, as before: 33, 33, 33. Again: that whispery two-second
Although Roy was far better acquainted with the capabilities and operation of sophisticated computers than was the average citizen, he had never seen most of the gadgetry on the desk. Some items appeared to be homemade. Small red and green bulbs shone on several peculiar devices, indicating that they were powered up. Tangles of cables, in various diameters, linked much of the familiar equipment with the units that were mysterious to him.
34
34
34
Something important was happening. Intuition told Roy that much. But
On the screen, the numbers advanced, from top to bottom, until all of them were thirty-five.
If the numbers had been descending, Roy might have thought that he was watching a countdown toward a detonation. A bomb. Of course, no cosmic law required that a time bomb had to be triggered at the end of a count
36
36
36
No, not a bomb. That didn’t make sense. Why would Grant want to blow up his own home?
Easy question. Because he was crazy. Paranoid. Remember the eyes in the computer-generated portrait: feverish, touched with madness.
Thirty-seven, top to bottom.
Roy started exploring the tangle of cables, hoping to learn something from the way in which the devices were linked.
A fly crept along his left temple. He brushed impatiently at it. Not a fly. A bead of sweat.
“What’s wrong?” Alfonse Johnson asked. He loomed at Roy’s side — abnormally tall, armored, and armed, as if he were a basketball player from some future society in which the game had evolved into a form of mortal combat.
On the screen, the count had reached forty. Roy paused with his hands full of cables, listened to the
If it wasn’t a bomb, what was it?
To grasp what was happening, he needed to think like Grant. Try to imagine how a paranoid sociopath might view the world. Look out through the eyes of madness. Not easy.
Well, all right, even if Grant was psychotic, he was also cunning, so after nearly being apprehended in the assault on the bungalow Wednesday night in Santa Monica, he had figured that a surveillance unit had photographed him and that he had become the subject of an intense search. He was an ex-cop, after all. He knew the routine. Although he’d spent the past year performing a gradual disappearing act from every public record, he hadn’t yet taken the final step into invisibility, and he’d been acutely aware that they would find his cabin sooner or later.
“What’s wrong?” Johnson repeated.
Grant would have expected them to break into his home in the same manner as they had broken into the bungalow. An entire SWAT team. Searching the place. Milling around.
Roy’s mouth was dry. His heart was racing. “Check the door frame. We must’ve set off an alarm.”
“Alarm? In this old shack?” Johnson said doubtfully.
“Do it,” Roy ordered.
Johnson hurried away.
Roy frantically sorted through the loops and knots of cables. The computer in action was the one with the most powerful logic unit among Grant’s collection. It was connected to a lot of things, including an unmarked green box that was, in turn, linked to a modem that was itself linked to a six-line telephone.
For the first time he realized that one of the red power-on lights gleaming in the equipment was actually the in-use indicator on line one of the telephone. An outgoing call was in progress.
He picked up the handset and listened. Data transmission was under way in the form of a cascade of electronic tones, a high-speed language of weird music without melody or rhythm.
“Magnetic contact here on the doorsill!” Johnson called from the front entrance.
“Visible wires?” Roy asked, dropping the telephone handset into the cradle.
