Dark Rivers of the Heart (48 page)

He put his hand on the SIG 9mm pistol that lay in his lap.

As the oncoming Chevy passed the Rover, the driver gave them a look of astonished recognition. He was big. About forty. A broad, hard face. His eyes widened, and his mouth opened as he spoke to another man in the van with him, and then he was gone.

Spencer turned in his seat to look after the Chevy, but because of Rocky and half a ton of gear, he wasn’t able to see through the tailgate window. He peered in his side mirror and watched the van as it dwindled westward behind them. No brake lights. It wasn’t turning to follow the Rover.

Belatedly, he realized that the driver’s look of astonishment had nothing to do with recognition. The man simply had been amazed by how fast they were going. According to the speedometer, Valerie was pressing eighty-five miles per hour, thirty over the legal speed limit and fifteen or twenty too fast for the condition of the road.

Spencer’s heart was thudding. Not because of her driving.

Valerie met his eyes again. She was clearly aware of the fear that had gripped him. “I warned you that you didn’t really want to know who they are.” She turned her attention to the highway. “Kind of gives you the heebie-jeebies, doesn’t it?”

“Heebie-jeebies doesn’t quite describe it. I feel as if…”

“You’ve been given an ice-water enema?” she suggested.

“You find even
this
funny?”

“On one level.”

“Not me. Jesus. If the attorney general knows,” he said, “then the
next
link up the chain—”

“The President of the United States.”

“I don’t know what’s worse: that maybe the president and the attorney general sanction an agency like you described…or that it operates at such a high level
without
their knowledge. Because if they don’t know, and they stumble across its existence—”

“They’re dead meat.”

“And if they don’t know, then the people who’re running this country aren’t the people we elected.”

“I can’t say it goes as high as the attorney general. And I don’t have a clue about Oval Office involvement. I hope not. But—”

“But you don’t rule out anything anymore,” he finished for her.

“Not after what I’ve been through. These days, I don’t really trust anyone but God and myself. Lately I’m not so sure about God.”

Down in the concrete aural cavity, where the agency listened to Las Vegas with a multitude of secret ears, Roy Miro said good-bye to Eve Jammer.

There were no tears, no qualms at being separated and possibly never seeing each other again. They were confident of being together soon. Roy was still energized by the spiritual power of Kevorkian, felt all but immortal. For her part, Eve seemed never to have realized that she
could
die or that anything she truly wanted—such as Roy—could be denied her.

They stood close. He put down his attaché case to be able to hold her flawless hands, and he said, “I’ll try to be back here this evening, but there’s no guarantee.”

“I’ll miss you,” she said huskily. “But if you can’t make it, I’ll do something to remember you by, something that will remind me how exciting you are and make me even more eager to have you back.”

“What? Tell me what you’re going to do, so I can carry the image in my mind, an image of you to make the time away pass faster.”

He was surprised at how good he was at this love talk. He had always known that he was a shameless romantic, but he had never been sure that he would know how to act when and if he ever found a woman who measured up to his standards.

“I don’t want to tell you now,” she said playfully. “I want you to dream, wonder, imagine. Because when you get back and I tell you—
then
we’ll have the most thrilling night we’ve had yet.”

The heat pouring off Eve was incredible. Roy wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and melt in her radiance.

He kissed her on the cheek. His lips were chapped from the desert air, and her skin was hot. It was a deliciously dry kiss.

Turning away from her was agony. At the elevator, as the doors slid open, he looked back.

She was poised on one foot, the other raised. On the concrete floor was a black spider.

“Darling, no!” he said.

She looked up at him, baffled.

“A spider is a
perfect
little creation, Mother Nature at her best. A spinner of beautiful webs. A perfectly engineered killing machine. Its kind have been here since before the first man ever walked the earth. It deserves to live in peace.”

“I don’t like them much,” she said with the cutest little pout that Roy had ever seen.

“When I get back, we’ll examine one together, under a magnifying glass,” he promised. “You’ll see how perfect it is, how compact and efficient and functional. Once I show you how perfect arachnids are, they’ll never seem the same to you again. You’ll cherish them.”

“Well,” she said reluctantly, “all right,” and she carefully stepped over the spider instead of tramping on it.

Full of love, Roy rode the elevator to the top floor of the high rise. He climbed a service staircase to the roof.

Eight of the twelve men in the strike force had already boarded the first of the two customized executive helicopters. With a hard clatter of rotors, the craft lifted into the sky, up and away.

The second—and identical—chopper was hovering at the north side of the building. When the landing pad was clear, the helicopter descended to pick up the four other men, all of whom were in civilian clothes but were carrying duffel bags full of weapons and gear.

Roy boarded last and sat at the back of the cabin. The seat across the aisle and the two in the forward row were empty.

As the craft took off, he opened his attaché case and plugged the computer power and transmission cables into outlets in the back wall of the cabin. He divorced the cellular telephone from the workstation and put it on the seat across the aisle. He no longer needed it. Instead, he was using the chopper’s communications system. A phone keypad appeared right on the display screen. After putting a call through to Mama in Virginia, he identified himself as “Pooh,” provided a thumbprint, and accessed the satellite-surveillance center in the Las Vegas branch of the agency.

A miniature version of the scene on the surveillance-center wall screen appeared on Roy’s VDT. The Range Rover was moving at reckless speeds, which strongly indicated that the woman was behind the wheel. It was past Panaca, Nevada, bulleting toward the Utah border.

“Something like this agency was bound to come along sooner or later,” she said as they approached the Utah border. “By insisting on a perfect world, we’ve opened the door to fascism.”

“I’m not sure I follow that.” He wasn’t certain that he wanted to follow it, either. She spoke with unsettling conviction.

“There’ve been so many laws written by so many idealists with competing visions of Utopia that nobody can get through a single day without inadvertently and unknowingly breaking a score of them.”

“Cops are asked to enforce tens of thousands of laws,” Spencer agreed, “more than they can keep track of.”

“So they tend to lose a true sense of their mission. They lose focus. You saw it happening when you were a cop, didn’t you?”

“Sure. There’s been some controversy, several times, about LAPD intelligence operations that targeted legitimate citizens’ groups.”

“Because those particular groups at that particular time were on the ‘wrong’ side of sensitive issues. Government has politicized every aspect of life, including law-enforcement agencies, and all of us are going to suffer for it, regardless of our political views.”

“Most cops are good guys.”

“I know that. But tell me something: These days, the cops who rise to the top in the system…are they usually the best, or are they more often the ones who’re politically astute, the great schmoozers. Are they ass kissers who know how to handle a senator, a congressman, a mayor, a city councilman, and political activists of all stripes?”

“Maybe it’s always been that way.”

“No. We’ll probably never again see men like Elliot Ness in charge of anything—but there used to be a lot like him. Cops used to respect the brass they served. Is it always that way now?”

Spencer didn’t even have to answer that one.

Valerie said, “Now it’s the politicized cops who set agendas, allocate resources. It’s worst at the federal level. Fortunes are spent chasing violators of vaguely written laws against hate crimes, pornography, pollution, product mislabeling, sexual harassment. Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to see the world rid of every bigot, pornographer, polluter, snake-oil peddler, every jerk who harasses a woman. But at the same time, we’re living with the highest rates of murder, rape, and robbery of any society in history.”

The more passionately Valerie spoke, the faster she drove.

Spencer winced every time he looked away from her face to the road over which they hurtled. If she lost control, if they spun out and flew off the blacktop into those towering spruces, they wouldn’t have to worry about hit squads coming in from Las Vegas.

Behind them, however, Rocky was exuberant.

She said, “The streets aren’t safe. Some places, people aren’t even safe in their own homes. Federal law-enforcement agencies have lost focus. When they lose focus, they make mistakes and need to be bailed out of scandals to save politicians’ hides—cop politicians, as well as the appointed and elected kind.”

“Which is where this agency without a name comes in.”

“To sweep up the dirt, hide it under the rug—so no politicians have to put their fingerprints on the broom,” she said bitterly.

They crossed into Utah.

They were still over the outskirts of North Las Vegas, only a few minutes into the flight, when the copilot came to the rear of the passenger compartment. He was carrying a security phone with a built-in scrambler, which he plugged in and handed to Roy.

The phone had a headset, leaving Roy’s hands free. The cabin was heavily insulated, and the saucer-size earphones were of such high quality that he could hear no engine or rotor noise, although he could feel the separate vibrations of both through his seat.

Gary Duvall—the agent in northern California who had been assigned to look into the matter of Ethel and George Porth—was calling. But not from California. He was now in Denver, Colorado.

The assumption had been made that the Porths had already been living in San Francisco when their daughter had died and when their grandson had first come to live with them. That assumption had turned out to be false.

Duvall had finally located one of the Porths’ former neighbors in San Francisco, who had remembered that Ethel and George had moved there from Denver. By then their daughter had been dead a long time, and their grandson, Spencer, was sixteen.

“A long time?” Roy said doubtfully. “But I thought the boy lost his mother when he was fourteen, in the same car accident where he got his scar. That’s just two years earlier.”

“No. Not just two years. Not a car accident.”

Duvall had unearthed a secret, and he was clearly one of those people who relished being in possession of secrets. The childish I-know-something-that-you-don’t-know tone of his voice indicated that he would parcel out his treasured information in order to savor each little revelation.