Remi went to her seat beside Sam. To Zoltan she said,
The refueling and the preflight inspection were completed and the steward closed the cabin door. Sam got up, went to the carrier, and came back with a bag of dog treats.
“Good idea,” Pete said. “Those will buy us time if he decides to eat us.”
“Don’t worry about him,” said Sam. “He’s better educated than we are. He’s trained to recognize which people need eating and to protect the rest of us.” Remi leaned down and hugged Zoltan again, then gave him a treat.
The pilot started the engines and the passengers fastened their seat belts. As the plane moved ahead, taxiing over the pavement, Zoltan looked watchful and ate his treat. The plane reached the end of the runway and turned into the wind. While the plane accelerated along the runway and then rose into the air, Remi kept her hand on Zoltan’s shoulder to reassure him. “Don’t worry, Zoltan. I’m here with you.” Her safe, calm, musical voice seemed to relax him. As the rattles and vibrations ended and the plane lifted off the ground, Zoltan let his big head rest on the carpet and settled in for a long flight.
Remi leaned close to Sam and whispered, “I love him. And I love you. But this is so extravagant. A dog like him, with his training, costs as much as a Rolls-Royce.”
“A Rolls-Royce is a great machine. But it won’t trade its life for yours.”
Sam tilted back his seat and so did Remi. She rested her head on his chest. Zoltan looked up at them once, then surveyed the cabin and laid his head down again and closed his eyes.
IT WAS SUNSET WHEN REMI AND ZOLTAN WENT OUT FOR their evening run along the beach. In the weeks since the Fargos had returned from Europe, Remi had devoted a great deal of time to working with Zoltan. She had wanted him to get used to the part of the world that would be his home.
So far, Zoltan seemed to like La Jolla. He was utterly calm and peaceful. When she walked, he walked. When she ran, he ran. Today she had run to the little protected beach at the south end of La Jolla that was called the Children’s Pool. Lying on every inch of the beach and the concrete breakwater were about a hundred seals and sea lions. She knew there was no way Zoltan could have seen seals or sea lions in Hungary, but he seemed no more inclined to bother the resting sea mammals than he had been to bother a tree or a park bench.
They turned back and ran along the concrete path toward Goldfish Point, then up onto the green lawn and past the palm trees of the park to the Valencia Hotel. As she looked out beyond the park’s vast lawn to the ocean, she thought about what an incredible place this was. La Jolla meant “the Jewel,” and it was the right name. She and Sam had chosen to build their house up above Goldfish Point, at the north end of the little district. The point was the entrance to the surf-splashed caves along the rocky part of the coast and was named for the bright orange Garibaldi that swam in La Jolla Cove.
When Remi and Sam had designed their house, they had just spent six years devoting all their time to building and running their company, which produced and sold the argon laser scanner that he had invented. They had been offered an astonishing sum for the company and its patents and had made the sale. For the first time not only could they afford to build a large and expensive house, they had the time and energy to devote to it.
When it was finished, the house was twelve thousand square feet on four floors planted above Goldfish Point. The top floor held Sam and Remi’s master suite, two bathrooms, two walk-in closets, a small kitchen, and a sitting room with a wall of windows that looked out on the ocean. The third floor held four guest suites, the main living room, the main kitchen, and the dining room. They had decided to use the second floor for a gym, an endless lap pool, a climbing wall, and a thousand-square-foot strip for Remi’s fencing and Sam’s judo.
The only place for an office was the ground floor. It had open work spaces for Sam, Remi, Selma, and up to four researchers. There were more guest bedrooms, a lab, and a fourteen-foot-long saltwater aquarium with plants and animals from the California coast.
As Remi and Zoltan took their evening jog home, she looked out beyond the cove and saw two yachts she had not noticed there earlier. They sat offshore about a half mile and, from her perspective on the path above the beach, they looked as though they were almost touching. They were both big, fast cruisers in the 130-foot class, a kind of yacht that she had seen European celebrities charter in the western Mediterranean. They were commonly capable of about sixty knots, and a few were faster. She’d seen a few like them in the San Diego Harbor in the past couple years, but they were extremely expensive and better suited for speeding people between the Greek islands or along the French Riviera than plying the Pacific.
She and Zoltan were past the hotel now and beginning to make their way up to the street that led to the higher wooded plateau where their house stood. She could see it from where they were, perched up on the hillside, its walls of windows facing the ocean on three sides. The lights in the house were warm and welcoming to her. Sam had designed and installed a system of individual sensors that automatically turned on a few lights on each floor at dusk. Because there were few interior walls, that gave most of the house a golden glow.
Remi kept trotting up the hill, which was the hardest part of her daily run, when she noticed that, all at once, Zoltan became oddly agitated. He leapt forward and then stopped abruptly at her feet and stared ahead with his amber-and-black German shepherd eyes. Remi stopped and stood beside him, trying to determine what he was staring at. Something ahead on the winding street was worrying him.
Remi was concerned and now even more impatient to get home. She knew enough about Zoltan’s sense of smell, his training, and his predator’s ability to detect the presence of living things hidden from human view to know he was evaluating something he considered unusual and important. She considered putting his leash on. Maybe she had discovered a situation where he was unreliable. She’d heard stories of shepherds going after postal workers because of the smell of dry-cleaning fluid on their uniforms. It could be something like that. Actually, no, it couldn’t. He was exquisitely trained, and using the leash would have seemed to her to show a lack of faith in him.
While she was waiting for him, Zoltan began to move forward again. He didn’t trot, as he had before. His head was low, his nose sniffing the air and his eyes fixed on something Remi couldn’t see. His shoulders flexed as he began to stalk. His whole body went lower now, compact like a compressed spring.
Remi didn’t talk to calm Zoltan or rein him in. He wasn’t investigating now. He was sure there was a threat. She walked along behind him, marveling at his single-minded concentration. He stopped again, and then she heard the sound. She felt it in her body, the nerves in her hands, because she had heard the same sound so many times when she pushed a loaded magazine up between the grips and into the receiver and it clicks into place. She heard the slide being pulled back to allow a round to pop up into the chamber.
Zoltan took four steps at a dead run and leapt into the foliage ahead. He came down halfway into a privet hedge, gripping a man’s arm in his teeth. He shook it until the man lost his grip and the gun clattered on the pavement. Zoltan charged forward, pushing the man backward so he couldn’t retrieve his weapon.
Remi ran forward, kicked the gun off the road into the darkness, and kept going. Now Zoltan was ahead of her again, running toward the house. He didn’t wait for the driveway but instead took the shortcut through the pine woods, and she followed him. He tore ahead of her in the darkness, running silently on the thick layer of needles. Twice as she ran, she saw him veer off, heard him tear into something with a growl, and then heard the scream of a human voice join his snarl. She sprinted to catch up and then she saw a silhouette. It was the shape of a man making a quick dash across the path. Zoltan collided with him, not changing his pace and throwing his big body against the man, shunting him aside onto the ground.
Then Remi and Zoltan were through the woods and running across the lawn, then up the concrete walkway, then up the steps. She heard the men running after her, and they were fast, only a couple of steps behind her now. Zoltan turned, growling, and charged. She heard the sounds of the fighting as she flung the door open and Zoltan ran inside with her. She slammed the door and as she slipped the bolt she let out a scream: “Sam!” There was a thud against the door as someone tried to shoulder it open.
Zoltan barked, and Remi screamed again as she ran deeper into the house. “Sam!”
