“You will enter by their back door. Under the doormat is a key that I have left for you.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Convinced that his subject wouldn’t have the technical knowledge necessary to commit a completely successful act of arson, wanting to be certain the house would be utterly destroyed, the doctor huddled against the pummeling wind and devoted five minutes to an explanation of how flammable liquids and highly combustible materials already on the premises could be best used to supplement the gasoline. Further, he enlightened his dutiful listener on the four crucial architectural details that could be used to serve an arsonist’s purposes.
In spite of the danger in which they found themselves or perhaps because of it, in spite of their grief or because of it, Martie and Dusty made love. Their slow, easy coupling was as much affirmation as sex: an affirmation of life, of their love for each other, and of their faith in the future.
For sweet minutes, no fear troubled them, no demons of the mind or demons of the world, nor did the hotel room seem either small or stifling, as before. For the duration of these silken rhythms, there was no blurring of the line between fact and fiction, between reality and fantasy, because reality was reduced to their two bodies and the tenderness they shared.
At home, in his lacewood-paneled study, the doctor sat in his ergonomic ostrich-skin chair, touched one of the many buttons inset in an extractable writing slide, and watched as his computer rose out of the top of the desk. The lift mechanism purred softly.
He composed a message, warning of Martine and Dustin Rhodes’s travel plans, providing detailed descriptions, and requesting, as a personal courtesy, that they be kept under surveillance from the moment they landed in New Mexico. If their investigation proved fruitless, they were to be allowed to return to California. If they obtained any information damaging to the doctor, he preferred to have them killed there in the Land of Enchantment, as the natives called it, to save him the trouble of disposing of them when they returned here to the Golden State. If termination in New Mexico was deemed necessary, then the couple should first be persuaded to reveal the whereabouts of Mr. Rhodes’s brother, Skeet Caulfield.
As Ahriman reviewed his message to be sure it was clear, he was not optimistic that he’d ever again see either Dusty or Martie alive, and yet he was not entirely without hope. They had been astonishingly resourceful thus far, but he had to believe that a mere housepainter and a girl video-game designer would have their limits.
If they exhibited little talent for playing detectives, perhaps when they returned to California, Ahriman would be able to engineer a meeting with them. He could access them, interrogate them to learn what they knew about his true nature, and rehabilitate them, removing all memories that would either inhibit their continued obedience or diminish their programmed admiration for him.
If that could be done, the game would be salvaged.
He could have asked the operatives in New Mexico to abduct the couple and put them, one at a time, on the telephone with him, which would allow him to access, interrogate, and rehabilitate them long-distance. Unfortunately, this would make his friends privy to his private game, and he didn’t want them to know anything about his strategies, motivations, and personal pleasures.
Currently, he and the fellowship of puppeteers in New Mexico had an ideal relationship, mutually beneficial. Twenty years ago, Dr. Ahriman had developed the effective formula of combined drugs that induced a programmable state of mind, and he had continually refined it ever since. He also had written the bible on programming techniques, from which others did not deviate to this day. A handful of men — and two women — could perform these miracles of control, but the doctor was without peer in the fellowship. He was the puppeteer of puppeteers, and when they had a particularly difficult or delicate job, they came to him. He never denied them, never charged them — but did receive reimbursement of all travel expenses, a generous per diem dining allowance when on the road, and a small but thoughtful gift of some personal item (lambskin driving gloves, lapis lazuli cuff links, a necktie hand-painted by the uncannily gifted children of a Tibetan orphanage for the mystic deaf) every Christmas.
Three or four times a year, at their request, he flew to Albany or to Little Rock, to Hialeah or to Des Moines, or to Falls Church, more often than not to places he would otherwise never have seen, costumed to pass unnoticed by the locals, traveling under such false names as Jim Shaitan, Bill Sammael, and Jack Apollyon. There, with a staff at his command, he conducted programming sessions — usually on one or two subjects — over three to five days, before winging home to the balmy shores of the Pacific. In compensation and as recognition of his unique status, Ahriman was the only member of the fellowship permitted by their overseers to apply his skills to private projects.
One of the other psychologists in the project — a young, goateed German American whose unfortunate surname was Fugger — had attempted to presume this fringe benefit for himself, but he had been caught. In front of the other programmers, as an object lesson, Fugger was dismembered and fed in pieces to a pit full of thrashing crocodiles.
Because Dr. Ahriman was not prohibited from private enterprises, he had not received an invitation and had learned of the disciplinary action only after the fact. He had lived his life in such a way that he had few regrets, but he sorely wished that he could have attended Fugger’s going-out party.
Now, at the onyx-topped desk in his lacewood-paneled study, the doctor added two lines to his message, to report that the actor had been fully programmed as requested and that the presidential nose was soon to receive wall-to-wall media coverage for at least a week, complete with learned analyses by the usual experts as well as by a few leading nasologists.
A team of aggressive investigators, turned loose by the White House and currently probing into the varied activities of certain overreaching bureaucrats in the Commerce Department, would no doubt be reined in within twenty-four hours of the reattachment of the chief executive’s proboscis, and the government could get back to the business of the people.
Always a politician himself, the doctor added a few personal notes: a happy-birthday greeting to one of the other programmers; a query as to the health of the project director’s oldest child, who had been ill with a particularly severe case of the flu; and hearty congratulations to Curly, in maintenance, whose girlfriend had accepted his proposal of marriage.
He sent the document to the institute in Santa Fe, via E-mail, using an unbreakable encryption program not available to the general public, one that had been designed for the exclusive use of the fellowship and its support staff.
What a day.
Such highs, such lows.
To lift his spirits and to reward himself for remaining so calm and focused in the face of adversity, the doctor went to the kitchen and constructed a large cherry ice-cream soda. He also gave himself a plate of Milano cookies by Pepperidge Farm, which had been one of his mother’s favorites, too.
Banshees of wind shrieking down out of the sky, goblin cries of sirens cycling upward, trees caught between and tossing-roaring in torment, ragged scarves of orange sparks winding through the tresses of the palms and Indian laurels: This was Halloween in January or any day in Hell. Now more second-story windows exploded, shards of glass glittering with reflections of fire and plinking onto the front-porch roof like an unmelodious piano passage in a symphony of destruction.
Fire engines and emergency vehicles choked the narrow street, mars lights and spotlights revolving and blazing, departmental radios burning with dispatchers’ voices that crackled like flames. Python colonies of hoses serpentined across the wet pavement, as if charmed forth by the rhythmic throbbing of the pumpers.
The Rhodes residence had been fully engulfed by the time the first engine company arrived, and because houses in this neighborhood stood so close together, the firemen’s initial efforts were directed toward watering down neighbors’ roofs and the surrounding trees to prevent the flames from spreading structure to structure. With that disaster narrowly averted, the deluge gun atop the largest pumper was brought to bear on the Victorian.
The house, with all its ornamental millwork, was bright in its wreaths of fire, but beneath the flames, the colorful San Francisco-style paint job was already scorched away, replaced by soot and char. The front wall buckled, shattering the last window. The main roof sagged. The porch roof collapsed. All the hoses were trained on the place
