A steep slope of gravel and shale rose thirty or forty feet to the east-west lanes. Even if he could find a break in the guardrail above him, no escape could be found — and certainly no salvation — on that highway. The people who were seeking him would establish checkpoints in both directions.
After a brief hesitation, he turned south, following the base of the elevated interstate.
From the east, across the white sand and the pink-gray slate, came the mold-green Chevrolet. It was like a heat mirage, although the day was cool. The low dunes and shallow washes would defeat it. The Explorer was made for overland travel; the Chevrolet was not.
Spencer came to a waterless riverbed, which the interstate crossed on a low concrete bridge. He drove into that declivity, onto a soft bed of silt, where driftwood slept and where dead tumbleweeds moved as ceaselessly as strange shadows in a bad dream.
He followed the dry wash under the interstate, west into the inhospitable Mojave.
The forbidding sky, as hard and dark as sarcophagus granite, hung within inches of the iron mountains. Desolate plains rose gradually toward those more sterile elevations, with a steadily decreasing burden of withered mesquite, dry bunchgrass, and cactus.
He drove out of the arroyo but continued to follow it upslope, toward distant peaks as bare as ancient bones.
The Chevrolet was no longer in sight.
Finally, when he was sure that he was far beyond the casual notice of any surveillance teams posted to watch the traffic on the interstate, he turned south and paralleled that highway. Without it as a reference, he would be lost. Whirling dust devils spun across the desert, masking the telltale plumes cast up behind the Explorer.
Although no rain yet fell, lightning scored the sky. The shadows of low stone formations leaped, fell back, and leaped again across the alabaster land.
Rocky’s cloaks of courage had been cast off as the Explorer’s speed had fallen. He was huddled once more in folds of cold timidity. He whined periodically and looked at his master for reassurance.
The sky cracked with fissures of fire.
Roy Miro pushed the troubling photographs aside and set up his attache case computer on the kitchen table in the Malibu cabin. He plugged it into a wall outlet and connected with Mama in Virginia.
When Spencer Grant had joined the United States Army, as a boy of eighteen, more than twelve years ago, he must have completed the standard enlistment forms. Among other things, he’d been required to provide information about his schooling, his place of birth, his father’s name, his mother’s maiden name, and his next of kin.
The recruiting officer through whom he had enlisted would have verified that basic information. It would have been verified again, at a higher level, prior to Grant’s induction into the service.
If “Spencer Grant” was a phony identity, the boy would have had considerable difficulty getting into the army with it. Nevertheless, Roy remained convinced that it was not the name on Grant’s original birth certificate, and he was determined to discover what that birth name had been.
At Roy’s request, Mama accessed the Department of Defense dead files on former army personnel. She brought Spencer Grant’s basic information sheet onto the display screen.
According to the data on the VDT, Grant’s mother’s name, which he had given to the army, was Jennifer Corrine Porth.
The young recruit had listed her as “deceased.”
The father was said to be “unknown.”
Roy blinked in surprise at the screen. UNKNOWN.
That was extraordinary. Grant had not simply claimed to be a bastard child, but had implied that his mother’s promiscuity had made it impossible to pinpoint the man who fathered him. Anyone else might have cited a false name, a convenient fictional father, to spare himself and his late mother some embarrassment.
Logically, if the father was genuinely unknown, Spencer’s last name should have been Porth. Therefore, either his mother borrowed the “Grant” from a favorite movie star, as Bosley Donner believed she’d done, or she named her son after one of the men in her life even without being certain that he had fathered the boy.
Or the “unknown” was a lie, and the name “Spencer Grant” was just another false identity, perhaps the first of many, that this phantom had manufactured for himself.
At the time of Grant’s enlistment, with his mother already dead and his father unknown, he had given his next of kin as “Ethel Marie and George Daniel Porth, grandparents.” They had to be his mother’s parents, since Porth was also her maiden name.
Roy noticed that the address for Ethel and George Porth — in San Francisco — had been the same as Grant’s current address at the time that he’d enlisted. Apparently the grandparents had taken him in, subsequent to the death of his mother, whenever that had been.
If anyone knew the true story of Grant’s provenance and the source of his scar, it would be Ethel and George Porth. Assuming that they actually existed and were not just names on a form that a recruitment officer had failed to verify twelve years ago.
Roy asked for a printout of the pertinent portion of Grant’s service file. Even with what seemed to be a good lead in the Porths, Roy wasn’t confident of learning anything in San Francisco that would give more substance to this elusive phantom whom he’d first glimpsed less than forty-eight hours ago in the rainy night in Santa Monica.
Having erased himself entirely from all utility-company records, from property tax rolls, and even from the Internal Revenue Service files — why had Grant allowed his name to remain in the DMV, Social Security Administration, LAPD, and military files? He had tampered with those records to the extent of replacing his true address with a series of phony addresses, but he could have entirely eliminated them. He had the knowledge and the skill to do so. Therefore, he must have maintained a presence in some data banks for a purpose.
Roy felt that somehow he was playing into Grant’s hands even by trying to track him down.
Frustrated, he turned his attention once more to the two most affecting of the forty photographs. The woman, the boy, and the barn in the background. The man in the shadows.
On all sides of the Explorer lay sand as white as powdered bones, ash-gray volcanic rock, and slopes of shale shattered by millions of years of heat, cold, and quaking earth. The few plants were crisp and bristly. Except for the dust and vegetation stirred by the wind, the only movement was the creeping and slithering of scorpions, spiders, scarabs, poisonous snakes, and the other cold-blooded or bloodless creatures that thrived in that arid wasteland.
Silvery quills and nibs of lightning flashed continually, and fast-moving thunderheads as black as ink wrote a promise of rain across the sky. The bellies of the clouds hung heavy. With great crashes of thunder, the storm struggled to create itself.
Captured between the dead earth and tumultuous heavens, Spencer paralleled the distant interstate highway as much as possible. He detoured only when the contours of the land required compromise.
Rocky sat with head bowed, gazing at his paws rather than at the stormy day. His flanks quivered as currents of fear flowed through him like electricity through a closed circuit.
On another day, in a different place and in a different storm, Spencer would have kept up a steady line of patter to soothe the dog. Now, however, he was in a mood that darkened with the sky, and he was able to focus only on his own turmoil.
For the woman, he had walked away from his life, such as it was. He had left behind the quiet comfort of the cabin, the beauty of the eucalyptus grove, the peace of the canyon — and most likely he would never be able to return to that. He had made a target of himself and had put his precious anonymity in jeopardy.
He regretted none of that — because he still had the hope of gaining a real life with some kind of meaning and purpose. Although he had wanted to help the woman, he had also wanted to help himself.
But the stakes suddenly had been raised. Death and disclosure were not the only risks he was going to have to take if he continued to involve himself in Valerie Keene’s problems. Sooner or later, he was going to have to kill someone. They would give him no choice.
After escaping the assault on the bungalow in Santa Monica on Wednesday night, he had avoided thinking about the most disturbing implications of the SWAT team’s extreme violence. Now he recalled the gunfire directed
