Last Gasp

BREAKFAST IN IDAHO

In the hotel coffee shop Cheryl thought Dan looked sickly. 'How do you feel? Are you all right?'

He shrugged listlessly, scooping up cereal. 'I just wish we could stop somewhere for a few days.'

'I thought you wanted to see America?'

'You call this seeing it? Can't we stay somewhere?'

Cheryl looked at Chase over her waffles and syrup. Then she said to Dan, 'We do have a lot of people to meet. Gavin has meetings and interviews lined up all the way to California. It's a vacation for you, Dan, work for us.'

'Some vacation.'

Chase sympathized. To an active sixteen-year-old this continual moving from one hotel to another must have seemed like changing prison cells. But the itinerary was fixed and he couldn't alter or cancel it.

He said, 'We'll stop for a few days when we reach the coast, fair enough?'

'The Pacific?' Dan said, brightening.

Chase nodded, avoiding Cheryl's eye. The great and glorious Pacific. He prayed that the waves still moved.

As he pressed the lever on the wrought-iron gate and stepped out of the elevator Claude Alain Lautner had only one thing on his mind. Ash-blond, five feet seven, twenty-two years of age, and her name was Marie-Rose Duvall.

They had met by chance at an embassy cocktail party--but then weren't all such providential meetings by chance? Lautner considered himself extremely lucky, at forty-four, divorced, rather lonely, to have won such a luscious young prize. He was even beginning to believe that he might be in love with her. She certainly seemed infatuated with him.

Humming under his breath, he turned into the short corridor leading to his third-floor apartment on the rue Fontaine and startled the plainclothes policeman sitting outside the door, who dropped his Agatha Christie paperback.

'Good evening, Maurice,' Lautner greeted him genially.

Maurice stood up hastily, clutching the mangled paperback in his huge fist. 'Evening, Monsieur Lautner.'

'I shall be going out at eight o'clock,' Lautner said, letting himself into the apartment. 'Tell the overnight man--who is it? Charles?--I shan't be back till around two.'

'Very good, sir.' Maurice hesitated. His thick eyebrows lifted a mere questioning millimeter. 'Ministry transport, sir?'

In other circumstances Lautner would have been annoyed, but right now he felt a warm glow at the promise of the evening ahead. He nodded, gave a brief smile, and closed the door.

Churlish of him to be irritable with the guards. They were simply obeying instructions from the minister of the interior. There had been too many incidents recently involving high-ranking government officials, and it was only common sense to take precautions against terrorist groups, cranks, and media vamps--deranged people who sought ephemeral glory by some act of atrocity that got them into the headlines and on TV.

Still, it was tiresome to be shadowed day and night by hulking members of the prefecture. No doubt they'd even have somebody posted in the restaurant while he and Marie-Rose dined by candlelight. Next, he thought resignedly, going into the bedroom, they'd have a man at the bedside reading a thriller while they made love. . . .

Lautner undressed and put on his silk dressing gown. Catching sight of himself in the full-length mirror of the open wardrobe door, he sucked in his stomach and pressed it flat with both hands. That would have to go, no two ways about it. Too much rich food and liquor and not enough exercise.

Otherwise not bad, he decided. Tanned face, deeply lined but the jawline was still firm; dark hair with silver wings brushed back elegantly over his ears; strong shoulders and an erect bearing. God, he'd seen men his age who looked ten, fifteen years older. Positively geriatric.

His little jaunty whistle was cut short when he found that the bathroom light wasn't working. He detested inefficiency, especially when it was to do with anything mechanical, and he jerked the switch uselessly and spitefully several times. Then he tried the fluorescent strip above the mirror, which, thankfully, was still functional. By its light he hung up his dressing gown, opened the shower door with its nymphs and cherubs, and hopped into the tiled cubicle.

He set the controls at seventy-two degrees, medium jet and pushed the stainless-steel lever to the right.

The fourth note of 'La Vie en Rose' became a startled gasp as the needle spray stung his scalp and streamed down his goosefleshed body. His eyes smarted terribly. The taste on his lips was bitter, the smell making his nostrils pinch and wrinkle it was so vile.

What the hell was this? Sewer water? Had the bastards gone on strike again?

Cursing, Lautner fumbled blindly for the handle of the door. The dense gasoline vapor now filling the bathroom ignited on the exposed live wires in the overhead light fixture, from which the pearled glass globe and plastic cover had been removed. A blue-edged sheet of flame streaked into the cubicle just as Lautner was emerging and transformed him into a human torch. His mouth yawned to its fullest extent in a scream of agony that never came out because the fierce heat instantly consumed the air in his lungs, suffocating him, and he fell clawing the air with fiery fingers, his own funeral pyre.

Lautner was dead before he landed on the tiled floor of the bathroom. In a few minutes nothing was left except a blackened, smoking, shrunken heap, unrecognizable as something once human, lying in a spreading pool of fat shimmering with little dancing orange and blue flames.

PORTLAND, OREGON

The chairman of the reception committee handed Chase an urgent message the moment they met in the arrivals hall at the airport. It had been cabled ahead by Chase's New York publisher and contained a telephone number and a request to call it immediately.

He did so from the public phone and found himself talking to somebody (he didn't catch her name) from the executive office of the secre-tary-general of the United Nations. Would he be on the first available flight to New York? No, she was sorry, she couldn't give reasons. She would like him to know that the matter was very important and highly confidential. Please call this number again the instant he landed in New York. Thank you so much.

'It must be important, Gavin, for them to have traced you. You have to go.' Cheryl smiled. 'Leave the rest of the schedule to me, I can handle it. And take Dan with you; it's probably his one and only chance to see New York before they close it down.'

The connecting flight to Salt Lake City left two hours later, at 4:30 p.m. Pacific time, father and son aboard: Chase bemused, Dan ecstatic.

A throbbing reverberation rose up and filled the shafts and tunnels and chambers with its deep mournful sound.

Mara raised himself from the straw pallet, instinctively obeying the gong that called the adepts to the evening meal. He came out of his cell and joined the line of figures in their black robes, silent except for the whispered shuffling of sandaled feet on smooth rock.

He had been fourteen when he first came, five years ago. Shy and withdrawn, given to dark moods, he had been one among thousands who started out on the pilgrimage, in his case from Kettering, near Dayton, Ohio. He had been six weeks on the road, sleeping rough, begging for food, when he met up with two other guys and a girl in a Buick Century that was falling apart at the seams. The girl and one of the guys had decided--even before they reached the settlement--that the Faith wasn't for them. Of the thousands who embarked on the trek to Nevada, and actually made it, few stayed longer than a month or two, and fewer still were accepted.

Mara was glad to see them go. Anyone who didn't possess the qualities of iron will and total dedication, the 'right stuff' as they were taught, had no right to be there. The Faith had no room for them. Cast them out as weak and unworthy. Let them perish along with the rest.

The gong boomed as the adepts shuffled below. The sound filled Mara's heart with peace. He belonged. His life had purpose.

The mountain they lived in was perfect: a honeycomb of old mine workings converted into a sealed, self-