Dark Rivers of the Heart

He supposed some people would think them mad. But anyone who was truly in love would understand.

With no need to go to the hotel, Roy arrived at the satellite-communications room early Monday. When he walked through the door, he knew that something exciting had transpired only moments before. Several people were gathered down front, gazing up at the wall display, and the buzz of conversation had a positive sound.

Ken Hyckman, the morning duty officer, was smiling broadly. Clearly eager to be the first to impart the good news, he waved at Roy to come down to the U-shaped control console.

Hyckman was a tall, blandly handsome, blown-dry type. He looked as if he had joined the agency following an attempt at a career as a TV news anchorman.

According to Eve, Hyckman had made several passes at her, but she had put a chill on him each time. If Roy had thought that Ken Hyckman was in any way a threat to Eve, he would have blown the bastard’s head off right there, and to hell with the consequences. He found considerable peace of mind, however, in the knowledge that he had fallen in love with a woman who could pretty much take care of herself.

“We found them!” Hyckman announced as Roy approached him at the control console. “She up-linked to Earthguard to see if we were using it for satellite surveillance.”

“How do you know it’s her?”

“It’s her style.”

“Admittedly, she’s a bold one,” Roy said. “But I hope you’ve got more to go on than sheer instinct.”

“Well, hell, the up-link was from the middle of nowhere. Who else would it be?” Hyckman asked, pointing at the wall.

The orbital view currently on display was a simple, enhanced, telescopic look-down that included the southern halves of Nevada and Utah, plus the northern third of Arizona. Las Vegas was in the lower left corner. The three red and two white rings of a small, flashing bull’s-eye marked the remote position from which the up-link had been initiated.

Hyckman said, “One hundred and fifteen miles north-northeast of Vegas, in desert flats northeast of Pahroc Summit and northwest of Oak Springs Summit. Middle of nowhere, like I told you.”

“It’s an EPA satellite we’re using,” Roy reminded him. “Could have been an EPA employee trying to up-link to get an aerial view of his work site beamed down to a computer there. Or a spectrographic analysis of the terrain. Or a hundred other things.”

“EPA employee? But it’s the middle of nowhere,” Hyckman said. He seemed stuck on that phrase, as though repeating the haunting lyrics of an old song. “Middle of nowhere.”

“Curiously enough,” Roy said with a warm smile that took the sting out of his sarcasm, “a lot of environmental research is done in the field, right out there in the environment, and you’d be amazed if you knew how much of the planet is in the middle of nowhere.”

“Yeah, maybe so. But if it was somebody legitimate, a scientist or something, why terminate contact so fast, before doing anything?”

“Now that is the first shred of meat you’ve provided,” Roy said. “But it’s not enough to nourish a certainty.”

Hyckman looked bewildered. “What?”

Instead of explaining, Roy said, “What’s with the bull’s-eye? Targets are always marked with a white cross.”

Grinning, pleased with himself, Hyckman said, “I thought this was more interesting, adds a little fun.”

“Looks like a video game,” Roy said.

“Thanks,” Hyckman said, interpreting the slight as a compliment.

“Factoring in magnification,” Roy said, “what altitude does this view represent?”

“Twenty thousand feet.”

“Much too high. Bring us down to five thousand.”

“We’re in the process right now,” Hyckman said, indicating some of the people working at the computers in the center of the room.

A cool, soft, female voice came from the control-center address system: “Higher-magnification view coming up.”

* * *

The terrain was rugged, if not forbidding, but Valerie drove as she might have driven on a smooth ribbon of freeway blacktop. The tortured Rover leaped and plunged, rocked and swayed, bounced and shuddered across that inhospitable land, rattling and creaking as if at any moment it would explode like the overstressed springs and gearwheels of a clockwork toy.

Spencer occupied the passenger seat, with the SIG 9mm pistol in his right hand. The Micro Uzi was on the floor between his feet.

Rocky sat behind them, in the narrow clear space between the back of the front seat and the mass of gear that filled the rest of the cargo area all the way to the tailgate. The dog’s good ear was pricked, because he was interested in their lurching progress, and his other ear flapped like a rag.

“Can’t we slow down a little?” Spencer asked. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the tumult: the roaring engine, the tires stuttering across a washboard gully.

Valerie leaned over the steering wheel, looked up at the sky, craned her head left and right. “Wide and blue. No clouds anywhere, damn it. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to make a run for it until we had clouds again.”

“Does it matter? What about the infrared surveillance you were talking about, the way they can see through clouds?”

Looking ahead again as the Range Rover chewed its way up the gully wall, she said, “That’s a threat when we’re sitting still, in the middle of nowhere, the only unnatural heat source for miles. But it’s not much good to them when we’re on the move. Especially not if we were on a highway, with other cars, where they can’t analyze the Rover’s heat signature and distinguish it in traffic.”

The top of the gully wall proved to be a low ridge, over which they shot with sufficient speed to be airborne for a second or two. They slammed front-tires-first onto a long, gradual slope of gray-black-pink shale.

Slivers of shale, spun up by the tires, showered against the undercarriage, and Valerie shouted to be heard above a hard clatter as loud as a hailstorm: “With a sky that blue, we have more to worry about than infrared. They have a clear, bare-eyed look-down at us.”

“You think they’ve already seen us?”

“You can bet your ass they’re already looking for us,” she said, barely audible because of the machine-gun shatters of shale that volleyed beneath them.

“Eyes in the sky,” he said, more to himself than to her.

The world seemed upside down: Blue heavens had become the place where demons lived.

Valerie shouted: “Yeah, they’re looking. And for sure, it won’t be much longer till we’re spotted, considering we’re the only moving thing, other than snakes and jackrabbits, for at least five miles in any direction.”

The Rover roared off the shale onto softer soil, and the sudden diminution of noise was such a relief that the usual tumult, which had earlier been so annoying, now seemed by comparison like the music of a string quartet.

Valerie said, “Damn! I only up-linked to confirm that it was clear. I didn’t really think they’d still be there, still tying up a satellite for a third day. And I sure as hell didn’t think they’d be locking on incoming signals.”

“Three days?”

“Yeah, they probably started surveillance before dawn Saturday, as soon as the storm passed and the sky cleared. Oh, man, they must want us even worse than I thought.”

“What day is this?” he asked uneasily.

“Monday.”

“I was sure this was Sunday.”

“You were dead to the world a lot longer than you think. Since sometime Friday afternoon.”

Even if unconsciousness had healed into ordinary sleep sometime during the previous night, he had been pretty much out of his head for forty-eight to sixty hours. Because he valued self-control so highly, the contemplation of such a lengthy delirium made him queasy.

He remembered some of what he’d said when he’d been out of his head. He wondered what else he had told her that he couldn’t recall.