helicopters. With a hard clatter of rotors, the craft lifted into the sky, up and away.
The second — and identical — chopper was hovering at the north side of the building. When the landing pad was clear, the helicopter descended to pick up the four other men, all of whom were in civilian clothes but were carrying duffel bags full of weapons and gear.
Roy boarded last and sat at the back of the cabin. The seat across the aisle and the two in the forward row were empty.
As the craft took off, he opened his attache case and plugged the computer power and transmission cables into outlets in the back wall of the cabin. He divorced the cellular telephone from the workstation and put it on the seat across the aisle. He no longer needed it. Instead, he was using the chopper’s communications system. A phone keypad appeared right on the display screen. After putting a call through to Mama in Virginia, he identified himself as “Pooh,” provided a thumbprint, and accessed the satellite-surveillance center in the Las Vegas branch of the agency.
A miniature version of the scene on the surveillance-center wall screen appeared on Roy’s VDT. The Range Rover was moving at reckless speeds, which strongly indicated that the woman was behind the wheel. It was past Panaca, Nevada, bulleting toward the Utah border.
“Something like this agency was bound to come along sooner or later,” she said as they approached the Utah border. “By insisting on a perfect world, we’ve opened the door to fascism.”
“I’m not sure I follow that.” He wasn’t certain that he wanted to follow it, either. She spoke with unsettling conviction.
“There’ve been so many laws written by so many idealists with competing visions of Utopia that nobody can get through a single day without inadvertently and unknowingly breaking a score of them.”
“Cops are asked to enforce tens of thousands of laws,” Spencer agreed, “more than they can keep track of.”
“So they tend to lose a true sense of their mission. They lose focus. You saw it happening when you were a cop, didn’t you?”
“Sure. There’s been some controversy, several times, about LAPD intelligence operations that targeted legitimate citizens’ groups.”
“Because those particular groups at that particular time were on the ‘wrong’ side of sensitive issues. Government has politicized every aspect of life, including law-enforcement agencies, and all of us are going to suffer for it, regardless of our political views.”
“Most cops are good guys.”
“I know that. But tell me something: These days, the cops who rise to the top in the system…are they usually the best, or are they more often the ones who’re politically astute, the great schmoozers. Are they ass kissers who know how to handle a senator, a congressman, a mayor, a city councilman, and political activists of all stripes?”
“Maybe it’s always been that way.”
“No. We’ll probably never again see men like Elliot Ness in charge of anything — but there used to be a lot like him. Cops used to respect the brass they served. Is it always that way now?”
Spencer didn’t even have to answer that one.
Valerie said, “Now it’s the politicized cops who set agendas, allocate resources. It’s worst at the federal level. Fortunes are spent chasing violators of vaguely written laws against hate crimes, pornography, pollution, product mislabeling, sexual harassment. Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to see the world rid of every bigot, pornographer, polluter, snake-oil peddler, every jerk who harasses a woman. But at the same time, we’re living with the highest rates of murder, rape, and robbery of any society in history.”
The more passionately Valerie spoke, the faster she drove.
Spencer winced every time he looked away from her face to the road over which they hurtled. If she lost control, if they spun out and flew off the blacktop into those towering spruces, they wouldn’t have to worry about hit squads coming in from Las Vegas.
Behind them, however, Rocky was exuberant.
She said, “The streets aren’t safe. Some places, people aren’t even safe in their own homes. Federal law- enforcement agencies have lost focus. When they lose focus, they make mistakes and need to be bailed out of scandals to save politicians’ hides — cop politicians, as well as the appointed and elected kind.”
“Which is where this agency without a name comes in.”
“To sweep up the dirt, hide it under the rug — so no politicians have to put their fingerprints on the broom,” she said bitterly.
They crossed into Utah.
They were still over the outskirts of North Las Vegas, only a few minutes into the flight, when the copilot came to the rear of the passenger compartment. He was carrying a security phone with a built-in scrambler, which he plugged in and handed to Roy.
The phone had a headset, leaving Roy’s hands free. The cabin was heavily insulated, and the saucer-size earphones were of such high quality that he could hear no engine or rotor noise, although he could feel the separate vibrations of both through his seat.
Gary Duvall — the agent in northern California who had been assigned to look into the matter of Ethel and George Porth — was calling. But not from California. He was now in Denver, Colorado.
The assumption had been made that the Porths had already been living in San Francisco when their daughter had died and when their grandson had first come to live with them. That assumption had turned out to be false.
Duvall had finally located one of the Porths’ former neighbors in San Francisco, who had remembered that Ethel and George had moved there from Denver. By then their daughter had been dead a long time, and their grandson, Spencer, was sixteen.
“A long time?” Roy said doubtfully. “But I thought the boy lost his mother when he was fourteen, in the same car accident where he got his scar. That’s just two years earlier.”
“No. Not just two years. Not a car accident.”
Duvall had unearthed a secret, and he was clearly one of those people who relished being in possession of secrets. The childish I-know-something-that-you-don’t-know tone of his voice indicated that he would parcel out his treasured information in order to savor each little revelation.
Sighing, Roy leaned back in his seat. “Tell me.”
“I flew to Denver,” Duvall said, “to see if maybe the Porths had sold a house here the same year they bought one in San Francisco. They had. So I tried to find some Denver neighbors who remembered them. No problem. I found several. People don’t move as often here as in California. And they recalled the Porths and the boy because it was such sensational stuff, what happened to them.”
Sighing again, Roy opened the manila envelope in which he was still carrying some of the photographs that he had found in the shoe box in Spencer Grant’s Malibu cabin.
“The mother, Jennifer, she died when the boy was eight,” Duvall said. “And it wasn’t in any accident.”
Roy slid the four photos out of the envelope. The topmost was the snapshot taken when the woman was perhaps twenty. She was wearing a simple summer dress, dappled in sun and shadow, standing by a tree that was dripping clusters of white flowers.
“Jenny was a horsewoman,” Duvall said, and Roy remembered the other pictures with horses. “Rode them, bred them. The night she died, she went to a meeting of the county breeder’s association.”
“This was in Denver, somewhere around Denver?”
“No, that’s where her parents lived. Jenny’s home was in Vail, on a small ranch just outside Vail, Colorado. She showed up at that meeting of the breeder’s association, but she never came home again.”
The second photograph was of Jennifer and her son at the picnic table. She was hugging the boy. His baseball cap was askew.
Duvall said, “Her car was found abandoned. There was a manhunt for her. But she wasn’t anywhere near home. A week later, someone finally discovered her body in a ditch, eighty miles from Vail.”
As when he’d sat at the kitchen table in the Malibu cabin on Friday morning and had sorted through the
