Washington after the war and began careers in the State Department, FBI, and Justice Department. With great care — but without delay, lest they discover Sharp at the DSA — he planned the murder of all three and executed those plans without a hitch.
Four others who knew the truth about him were still alive — including Shadway — but none of them was involved in government or seemed likely to discover him at the DSA. Of course, if he ascended to the director's chair, his name would more often appear in the news, and enemies like Shadway might be more likely to hear of him and try to bring him down. He had known for some time that those four must die sooner or later. When Shadway had gotten mixed up in the Leben case, Sharp had seen it as yet one more gift of fate, additional proof that he, Sharp, was destined to rise as far as he wished to go.
Given his own history, Sharp was not surprised to learn of Eric Leben's self-experimentation. Others professed amazement or shock at Leben's arrogance in attempting to break the laws of God and nature by cheating death. But long ago Sharp had learned that absolutes like Truth — or Right or Wrong or Justice or even Death — were no longer so absolute in this high-tech age. Sharp had remade his reputation by the manipulation of electrons, and Eric Leben had attempted to remake himself from a corpse into a living man by the manipulation of his own genes, and to Sharp it was all part of the same wondrous enchiridion to be found in the sorcerer's bag of twentieth-century science.
Now, sprawled comfortably in his motel bed, Anson Sharp enjoyed the sleep of the amoral, which is far deeper and more restful than the sleep of the just, the righteous, and the innocent.
Sleep eluded Jerry Peake for a while. He had not been to bed in twenty-four hours, had chased up and down mountains, had achieved two or three shattering insights, and had been exhausted when they got back to Palm Springs a short while ago, too exhausted to eat any of the Kentucky Fried Chicken that Nelson Gosser supplied. He was still exhausted, but he could not sleep.
For one thing, Gosser had brought a message from Sharp to the effect that Peake was to catch two hours of shut-eye and be ready for action by seven-thirty this evening, which gave him half an hour to shower and dress after he woke. Two hours! He needed ten. It hardly seemed worth lying down if he had to get up again so soon.
Besides, he was no nearer to finding a way out of the nasty moral dilemma that had plagued him all day: serve as an accomplice to murder at Sharp's demand and thereby further his career at the cost of his soul; or pull a gun on Sharp if that became necessary, thus ruining his career but saving his soul. The latter course seemed an obvious choice, except that if he pulled a gun on Sharp he might be shot and killed. Sharp was cleverer and quicker than Peake, and Peake knew it. He had hoped that his failure to shoot at Shadway would have put him in such disfavor with the deputy director that he would be booted off the case, dropped with disgust, which would not have been good for his career but would sure have solved this dilemma. But Sharp's talons were deep in Jerry Peake now, and Peake reluctantly acknowledged that there would be no easy way out.
What most bothered him was the certainty that a smarter man than he would already have found a way to use this situation to his great advantage. Having never known his mother, having been unloved by his sullen widowed father, having been unpopular in school because he was shy and introverted, Jerry Peake had long dreamed of remaking himself from a loser into a winner, from a nobody into a legend, and now his chance had come to start the climb, but he did not know what to do with the opportunity.
He tossed. He turned.
He planned and schemed and plotted against Sharp and for his own success, but his plans and schemes and plots repeatedly fell apart under the weight of their own poor conception and naivete. He wanted so badly to be George Smiley or Sherlock Holmes or James Bond, but what he
His sleep was filled with nightmares of falling off ladders and off roofs and out of trees while pursuing a macabre canary that had Anson Sharp's face.
Ben had wasted time ditching the stolen Chevette at Silverwood Lake and finding another car to steal. It would be suicidal to keep the Chevette when Sharp had both its description and license number. He finally located a new black Merkur parked at the head of a long footpath that led down to the lake, out of sight of its fisherman owner. The doors were locked, but the windows were open a crack for ventilation. He had found a wire coat hanger in the trunk of the Chevette — along with an incredible collection of other junk — and he had brought it along for just this sort of emergency. He'd used it to reach through the open top of the window and pop the door latch, then had hot-wired the Merkur and headed for Interstate 15.
He did not reach Barstow until four forty-five. He had already arrived at the unnerving conclusion that he would never be able to catch up to Rachael on the road. Because of Sharp, he had lost too much time. When the lowering sky released a few fat drops of rain, he realized that a storm would slow the Merkur down even more than the reliably maneuverable Mercedes, widening the gap between him and Rachael. So he swung off the lightly trafficked interstate, into the heart of Barstow, and used a telephone booth at a Union 76 station to call Whitney Gavis in Las Vegas.
He would tell Whitney about Eric Leben hiding in the trunk of Rachael's car. With any luck at all, Rachael would not stop on the road, would not give Eric an easy opportunity to go after her, so the dead man would wait in his hidey-hole until they were all the way into Vegas. There, forewarned, Whit Gavis could fire about six rounds of heavy buckshot into the trunk as Eric opened it from the inside, and Rachael, never having realized she was in danger, would be safe.
Everything was going to be all right.
Whit would take care of everything.
Ben finished tapping in the number, using his AT&T card for the call, and in a moment Whit's phone began to ring a hundred and sixty miles away.
The storm was still having trouble breaking. Only a few big drops of rain spattered against the glass walls of the booth.
The phone rang, rang.
The previously milky clouds had curdled into immense gray-black thunderheads, which in turn had formed still-darker, knotted, more malignant masses that were moving at great speed toward the southeast.
The phone rang again and again and again.
Be there, damn it, Ben thought.
But Whit was not there, and wishing him home would not make it true. On the twentieth ring, Ben hung up.
For a moment he stood in the telephone booth, despairing, not sure what to do.
Once, he'd been a man of action, with never a doubt in a crisis. But in reaction to various unsettling discoveries about the world he lived in, he had tried to remake himself into a different man — student of the past, train fancier. He had failed in that remake, a failure that recent events had made eminently clear: He could not just stop being the man he had once been. He accepted that now. And he had thought that he had lost none of his edge. But he realized that all those years of pretending to be someone else had dulled him. His failure to look in the Mercedes's trunk before sending Rachael away, his current despair, his confusion, his sudden lack of direction were all proof that too much pretending had its deadly effect.
Lightning sizzled across the swollen black heavens, but even that scalpel of light did not split open the belly of the storm.
He decided there was nothing to be done but hit the road, head for Vegas, hope for the best, though hope seemed futile now. He could stop in Baker, sixty miles ahead, and try Whit's number again.
Maybe his luck would change.
It
He opened the door of the booth and ran to the stolen Merkur.
Again, lightning blasted the charred sky.
A cannonade of thunder volleyed back and forth between the sky and the waiting earth.
The air stank of ozone.
He got in the car, slammed the door, started the engine, and the storm finally broke, throwing a million tons of water down upon the desert in a sudden deluge.
