flaring with blinding power in my infrared lenses.
I raised the goggles to my brow, switched off the infrared flashlight and jammed it under my belt. The lamplight wasn’t as bright as I had expected; the lenses had exaggerated it, because they weren’t meant to function in the ultraviolet spectrum. The others pulled up their goggles, too.
Beyond the gate valve was a fourteen-or sixteen-foot length of tunnel, clad in seamlessly butted sleeves of brushed stainless steel, terminating in a second valve, identical to the first. This one was already open approximately as far as Doogie had opened the first; the goggle-defeating UV light issued from the room beyond.
Sasha and Roosevelt remained at the first valve. Armed with the.38, Sasha would make sure that no one came along behind us to block what might be our only exit. Roosevelt, whose left eye was swelling again, stayed with her because he wasn’t armed and because he was our essential link to the cat.
The mouser hung with Sasha and Roosevelt, keeping safely out of the forward action. We hadn’t dropped a trail of bread crumbs on the way in, and we weren’t a hundred percent certain that we could find the route back to Bobby and the elevator without feline guidance.
I followed Doogie to the inner gate valve.
After peering into the space beyond the gate, he raised two fingers to suggest that there were only two people in there about whom we needed to worry. He indicated that he would go first, moving immediately to the right after entering, and that I should follow, going to the left.
As soon as he cleared the doorway, I slipped into the room, with the shotgun thrust in front of me.
The Twilight-of-the-Gods rumble, rattle, bang, and skreek that shook down through the entire facility, from roof to bedrock, was muffled here, and the only light came from an eight-battery storm lamp sitting on a card table.
This chamber was similar in shape to the egg room three floors overhead, though this was much smaller, about thirty feet long and fifteen feet in diameter at its widest point. The curving surfaces were sheathed not in that glassy, gold-flecked substance but in what appeared to be ordinary copper.
My heart soared when I saw the four missing children sitting with their backs to the wall in the shadows at one end of the room. They were exhausted and frightened. Their small wrists and ankles were bound, and their mouths were covered with strips of cloth tape. They were not visibly injured, however, and their eyes widened with amazement at the sight of Doogie and me.
Then I spotted Orson, lying on his side, near the kids, muzzled and restrained. His eyes were open, and he was breathing.
In the center of the room, frozen by Doogie’s gun, two men sat in padded folding chairs, facing each other across the card table that held the storm lamp. In this stark tableau, they reminded me of characters in a stripped- down stage set from one of those stultifying minimalist plays about boredom, isolation, emotional disconnection, the futility of modern relationships, and the sobering philosophical implications of the cheeseburger.
The guy on the right was the abb who had tried to brain me with a two-by-four under the warehouse. He was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing then, and he still had those tiny white teeth, although his smile was considerably more strained than it had been previously, as though he had just discovered a corn worm among that mouthful of white kernels.
I wanted to pump one shot into his mug, because I sensed not just smugness in the geek, but also vanity. After he took a magnum round at such close range, the only word adequate to describe his face would also spur on a dogsled team.
The man on the left was tall, blond, with pale green eyes and a puckered scar, in his mid-fifties. He was the one who had snatched the Stuart twins — and his smile was as winning as it had been when he was a boy of twelve with the blood of his parents on his hands.
John Joseph Randolph was unnervingly self-possessed, as if our arrival neither startled nor concerned him. “How’re you doing, Chris?”
I was surprised he knew my name. I’d never seen him before.
Whispery echoes of his voice were conducted like a current along the copper walls, one word overlaying the next: “Your mother, Wisteria — she was a great woman.”
I couldn’t understand how he knew my mother. Instinct told me that I didn’t want to know. A shotgun blast would silence him, and scour that smile off his face — the smile with which he charmed the innocent and the unwary — turning it into a lipless death’s-head grin.
“She was deadlier than Mother Nature,” he said.
Renaissance men ponder, brood, and analyze the complex moral consequences of their actions, preferring persuasion and negotiation to violence. Evidently, I’d forgotten to renew my membership in the Renaissance Man Club, and they had repossessed my principles, because all I wanted to do was blow away this butchering creep — and with extreme prejudice.
Or maybe I’m just becoming.
It’s the rage these days.
With my heart made brittle by bitterness, I might have pulled the trigger if the kids hadn’t been there to witness the carnage. I was also inhibited because the copper skin on the curved walls was guaranteed to spin deadly ricochets in all directions. My soul was saved not by the purity of my morals but by circumstances, which is a humbling confession.
With the barrel of the Uzi, Doogie gestured at the playing cards in the two men’s hands. “What’s the game?” His voice echoed tinnily around the curved copper walls.
I didn’t like these two men’s watchful calm. I wanted to see fear in their eyes.
Now Randolph turned his hand of cards faceup on the table and replied to Doogie’s question with too much dry amusement. “Poker.”
Before Doogie decided how best to restrain the card-players, he needed to determine, if he could, whether they had guns. They were wearing jackets that could conceal shoulder holsters. With nothing to lose, they might do something reckless — like take wild shots at the kids, rather than at us, before they themselves were cut down, hoping to kill one more tender victim just to go out on a final thrill.
With four children in the room, we didn’t dare make a mistake.
“If not for Wisteria,” Randolph said, addressing me, “Del Stuart would have pulled the plug on my financing long before he did.”
“Your financing?”
“But when she screwed up, they needed me. Or thought they did. To see what the future held.”
Sensing a pending revelation of an ugly truth, I said, “Shut up,” but I spoke in little more than a murmur, perhaps because I knew I needed to hear whatever he had to tell me, even if I’d no
To Doogie, Randolph said, “Ask me what the stakes are.”
The word
“Conrad and I play to see who gets to soak each of these tykes in gasoline.”
Conrad mustn’t have been in possession of a gun in the warehouse the previous night. If he’d had one, he would have shot me dead the moment that I touched his face in the dark.
Moving his hands as if dealing imaginary cards, Randolph said, “Then we play to see who gets to light the match.”
Looking as if he might shoot first and worry about ricochets later, Doogie said, “Why haven’t you killed them already?”
“Our numerology tells us there should be five in this offering. Until recently, we thought we had only four. But now we think…” He smiled at me. “We think the dog is special. We think the dog makes five. When you interrupted, we were playing cards to see who lights the mutt boy.”
I didn’t think that Randolph had a firearm, either. As far as I could remember from my hasty scan of his gallery of hellish achievement, his father was the only victim he’d dispatched with a gun. That was forty-four years ago, probably the first murder he’d committed. Since then, he preferred to have more personal involvement, to get right into the wet of the work. Hammers and knives and the like were his weapons of choice — until he started to make his burnt offerings.
