The Face (46 page)

CHAPTER 81

I
N THE RAIN AND FOG, THE RUINS OF THIS HOUSE recalled for Corky the final scene in du Maurier’s
Rebecca:
the great mansion known as Manderley ablaze in the night, the inky sky “shot with crimson, like a splash of blood,” and ashes on the wind.

No fire had touched these ruins high in Bel Air, nor was there currently either a wind or blown ashes, but the scene excited Corky nonetheless. In this rubble, he saw a symbol of greater chaos to come in the years ahead.

Once this had been a fine estate, where grand parties had been thrown for the rich and famous. The house, in the style of a French chateau, had been designed with graceful proportions, executed with elegant details, and had stood as a monument to stability and to the refined taste distilled from centuries of civilization.

These days, among the new princes and princesses of Hollywood, classic French architecture was passé, as in fact was history itself. Because the past was not fashionable, nor even comprehensible, the current owner of this property had decreed that the existing house must come down, to be replaced by a swooping-sprawling-glassy-shining residence more in tune with contemporary sensibilities, more hip.

In this community, after all, the value is in the land, not in what stands on it. Any real-estate professional will confirm this.

The house had first been stripped of all valuable architectural details. The limestone architrave at the front entrance, the carved window pediments, and numerous limestone columns had been salvaged.

Then the wrecking crew had been brought in. Half of their work had been completed. They were artists of destruction.

Minutes before seven o’clock, Corky had arrived on foot at the estate, having parked the four-year-old Acura several blocks away. He had purchased the Acura cheap, under a false identity, for the sole purpose of using it in this operation. Later, he had one more use for it, then would abandon it with the keys in the ignition.

At the entrance drive to the three-acre property, a two-panel construction gate with a steel-pipe frame and chain-link infill barred the way. A chain had been wound between the two panels and secured by a heavy padlock with a virtually indestructible case and a thick, titanium-steel shackle highly resistant to a bolt cutter.

Corky ignored the padlock and cut the chain.

Shortly thereafter, at the open gate, posing as NSA agent Robin Goodfellow, wearing a small backpack that he had taken from the trunk of the Acura, he had greeted Jack Trotter and his two-man prep crew, who arrived in a thirty-eight-foot truck. Corky directed them along the curved driveway, where they parked close to the house.

“This is madness,” Trotter had declared as he climbed out of the truck.

“Not at all,” Corky disagreed. “The wind has died completely.”

“It’s still raining.”

“Not furiously. And a little rain provides some covering noise, just what we need.”

In full Queeg von Hindenburg mode, Trotter wore pessimism with the grim authority of Nostradamus in his darkest mood. His bloated face sagged like a deflating balloon, and his protuberant eyes were wild with visions of doom. “We’re screwed in this fog.”

“It’s not that thick yet. Just enough to give us extra cover. It’s perfect. The trip is short, the target easily identifiable even in a medium fog.”

“We’ll be seen before we’re half ready to go.”

“This property’s on a knoll. No houses have a view down on it. We’re surrounded by trees, can’t be seen from the street.”

Trotter insisted on disaster: “We’re damn sure to be seen by someone between here and there.”

“Maybe,” Corky acknowledged. “But what will they make of what they’ve seen between palisades of fog?”

“Palisades?”

“I have an interest in literature, the beauty of the language,” Corky said. “Anyway, your entire mission time is probably seven or eight minutes. You’ll be back here, out of here, on the road before anyone can figure where your staging area was. Besides, I’ve got agents all over these hills, and they won’t let cops get near you.”

“And when I split from Malibu, I disappear from all government records. Me and all the names I’ve used.”

“That’s the deal. But you’d better get your ass in gear. The clock is ticking.”

Grimacing like a man in an advertisement for a diarrhea remedy, Trotter looked Corky up and down, then said, “What the hell do you call that getup you’re wearing?”

“Weatherproof,” Corky said.

Now, more than an hour later, Trotter and his two-man crew had nearly completed preparations.

During that time, Corky had entertained himself by studying the ruins of the half-demolished chateau from numerous angles.

He had not, of course, worked with Trotter and his men. As Robin Goodfellow, he was a highly trained human weapon, a valued government agent. Robin had signed up to pursue truth, justice, and adventure, but had never agreed to perform menial labor of any kind. James Bond does not dust furniture or do windows.

Without his assistance, however, the blimp had been fully inflated.

CHAPTER 82

T
HE THIRD NETMAIL WAS FROM MR. HACHETTE. I
NSPECTOR
T
RUMAN:
I
MYSELF BITTERLY EXPRESS HEREWITH EXTREME DISPLEASURE AT BEING EXPECTED TO CREATE THE MOST SUPERIOR OF HAUTE CUISINE THAT
I
AM CAPABLE ON A MOMENT’S NOTICE FOR THE BOTTOMLESS STOMACH OF A GUEST WHOSE PRESENCE IN THE HOUSE ISN’T REVEALED UNTIL HE APPEARS IN MY KITCHEN, SURPRISING ME LIKE A WEEVIL IN THE FLOUR SUPPLY.
M
R.
W
HISTLER’S MAGNIFICENT TASTE IN FOOD AND HIS PRAISE FOR MY UNIQUE COQUILLES
S
T.
J
ACQUES, AS FOR EVERY REFINED DISH OF MY DIFFICULT PREPARATION, IS PLEASING BUT DOES NOT GLUE TOGETHER MY SHATTERED NERVES, WHICH
I
WARN YOU ARE DEVASTATED AND FRAYED.
I
F THIS IS DONE TO ME AGAIN, BY YOU,
I
MUST RESIGN WITH CONSEQUENCES OF UNSPEAKABLE EXTREMITY.
I
AM ALSO DISPLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THAT THE BOY CLAIMS TO HAVE MADE HAM SANDWICHES IN MY KITCHEN WITHOUT PERMISSION, AND THAT
I
AM SHARPLY INVENTORYING THE PANTRY AT THIS TIME TO LEARN THE EXTENT OF HIS DESTRUCTION.
H
OPING THAT THESE OUTRAGES MUST NEVER BE REPEATED,
I
REMAIN,
C
HEF
H
ACHETTE.

Dead Dunny had moved right in. And with an appetite.

This was crazy. Ethan wanted to laugh, but he couldn’t work up as much as a smile. His mouth had gone dry. His palms were damp.

He went back to Yorn’s message: F
RIC IS MAKING HIMSELF A HIDEY-HOLE IN THE CONSERVATORY…YOUR FRIEND
W
HISTLER BROUGHT IT TO MY ATTENTION…BOYS PLAY AT
R
OBINSON
C
RUSOE…
W
HISTLER SCRAPES MY NERVES….

During Hannah’s battle with cancer, Ethan had felt helpless as never before. He had always been able to take care of the people who mattered to him, to do everything for them that needed to be done. But he couldn’t save Hannah, she who had been the dearest to him.

Once more, he felt control slipping out of his hands. With a state-of-the-art security system, on-site guards, and well-conceived security protocols, with full diligence, he could not keep Dunny off the estate, out of the house. Man or ghost, or a force to which no easy label applied, Dunny somehow had a connection with Reynerd and probably with the professor about whom Reynerd had written in his screenplay. Dunny must be part of the threat, and he mocked Ethan by his every intrusion, proving that no one here was safe.

If Ethan failed Channing Manheim, if someone got at the star in spite of all precautions, he would be failing not only his boss but also the special boy who’d be left fatherless. Fric would be remanded to the mercy of his self-absorbed mother, set further adrift than ever, consigned to a deeper loneliness than the one he already endured.

Ethan had gotten up from the computer without realizing it. He stood in a state of agitation, overwhelmed by the need to move, to do something, but unable to understand what must be done.

At the phone, he pressed
INTERCOM
and the number for the library. “Fric, are you there?” He waited. “Fric, you hear me?”

The boy’s voice came wrapped in a curious caution: “Who’s that?”

“Nobody here but us broken-down old former cops. Have you found a book?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t take too long.”

“Gimme a couple minutes,” Fric said.

As Ethan released the intercom button, a light flashed on the telephone, then burned steadily: Line 24.

He studied the items arranged on the desk between the computer and the telephone. Ladybugs, snails, foreskins…

His attention drifted back to the phone. The indicator lamp. Line 24.

The half-heard voice issuing from the far side of the moon, to which he’d listened for half an hour on this phone the previous night, had been resonating in his heart ever since. And the faint voice that he’d thought he heard coming from the musicless speaker in the hospital elevator just this morning.

Cookie jar full of Scrabble tiles, the book
Paws for Reflection,
the stitched apple with the eye at its core…

In the elevator, he had pressed
STOP
, not merely to listen longer to the voice but because he’d had the feeling that when he reached the hospital garage, no garage would be there. Only lapping black water. Or an abyss.

At the time, he had sensed that this absurd phobic response must be the sublimation of a more realistic fear he was reluctant to face. Now he was on the verge of grasping the true terror.

Suddenly he knew that reality as he perceived it was like the colored-glass image presented by the angled mirrors at the end of a kaleidoscope. The pattern of reality that he’d always seen was about to change before his eyes, about to shift into one far more dazzling, and fearsome.

Ladybugs, snails, foreskins…

Line 24, engaged.

The faraway voice echoed in his memory, like the cries of sea gulls, melancholy in a mist:
Ethan, Ethan
…

Phone calls from the dead.

Ladybugs, snails, foreskins…

The indicator lamp: a tiny version of the dome light high atop Our Lady of Angels Hospital, the last line on the phone board, last line, last chance, last hope.

Ethan caught the scent of roses. There were no roses in the apartment.

In his mind’s eye: Broadway roses on her grave, red-gold blooms against wet grass.

The fragrance of roses grew stronger, intense. The scent was real, not imagined, stronger here than in Forever Roses.

The skin crawling on the back of his neck, across his scalp, was the result less of ordinary fear than of humbling awe. A cool quiver in the pit of his stomach.

He had no key to the forbidden room behind the blue door, where calls on Line 24 were recorded. Suddenly he was in a mood that made keys unimportant.

With an intuitive sense of urgency that he could not explain but that he trusted, Ethan ran from the apartment to the back stairs and all the way to the third floor.

CHAPTER 83

T
ETHERED BY TWO FAINTLY THRUMMING ROPES to the sturdy limbs of a pair of old coral trees and by a taut nose line to the truck, the blimp appeared to be straining like a hooked fish, reeled here to the shallows of the air, but desperate to soar again into the depths of the sky.

Gray and whalelike, perhaps thirty feet in length and ten or twelve feet in diameter, the airship was a minnow compared to the Goodyear blimp. Yet to Corky it looked huge.

The leviathan loomed impressively, underlit by two Coleman lanterns that provided work light. Tinsel-silver rain streamed from its round flanks. The craft was more striking than its dimensions would suggest, perhaps because here in Bel Air in the first decade of the new millennium, a blimp was both out of place and out of time.

In addition to being a survivalist, a conspiracy-theory fanatic, and a nut case of several dangerous varieties, Jack Trotter was also a hot-air balloon enthusiast. He found inner peace only in the air, traveling with the wind. As long as he remained aloft, the agents of evil could not seize him and cast him down into a dank cell with no light other than the red glow of rats’ eyes.

He owned a traditional rig—the colorfully striped envelope, the inflation fan, the propane-fueled burner, the basket for pilot and passengers—which he sometimes took up alone, the sole balloonist on a sweet spring morning or on a golden summer evening. He also joined rallies of celestial navigators, when twenty or thirty or more bright balloons launched in rough synchronization and drifted in a school through the heavens.

A hot-air balloon was all but entirely at the mercy of the wind. The pilot could neither plan a pinpoint destination nor provide an estimated time of arrival to the minute or even to the quarter hour.

The assault on Palazzo Rospo required a highly maneuverable craft that could travel at cross purposes to at least a light wind. As well, it must be able to ascend without the ungodly roar of a propane burner, which always set dogs barking within a quarter-mile radius. Furthermore, it must be able to descend as smoothly as a dove glides from cloud to bower, if more slowly than a dove, and must also be able to hover like a hummingbird.

Trotter enjoyed the astonishment and excitement with which fellow sky sailors regarded his custom-made craft on those occasions when he left his hot-air balloon at home and brought the little blimp instead. Not garrulous by nature, lacking many social graces, Trotter nonetheless could expect to be the hit of the rally in his miniature airship.

Corky suspected that in his perpetually fevered mind, Trotter also regarded the blimp as a last-ditch escape vehicle in the event that an abruptly declared dictatorship tried for any reason to seal off highway traffic in and out of major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and surrounding communities. He probably envisioned himself foiling the totalitarians on a night of a crescent moon, with enough light to navigate but not enough to be easily seen, sailing high above roadblocks and concentration camps, north into farm country and toward the Sierra foothills, where he could eventually set down and proceed on foot, overland, to one of his well-prepared bolt-holes.

After drawing Corky away from the ruins of the chateau, Trotter said, “We’ll be out of here in less than five minutes.”

The two-man prep crew was conducting final checks of the airship systems and gear.

They were rent-a-thugs involved in Ecstasy distribution with Trotter. After he delivered Corky to Palazzo Rospo and returned to the chateau in the blimp, when these men had snared the nose line and anchored him by three tethers, Trotter would kill them.

“I haven’t heard you charging the batteries,” Corky said.

“They were fully charged before we came here.”

“Airborne, we can’t use the engine, not for a minute.”

“I know, I know. Man, haven’t you busted my ass about it enough already? We won’t need the engine for this short a trip, with the air this calm.”

The blimp’s twin can-mounted propeller fans, slung from the back of the gondola, were usually driven by a riding-lawnmower engine. The turning blades produced an acceptably soft sound, but the engine racket made stealthy travel impossible.

“With little or no headwind,” Trotter said, “I can run two hours on batteries, maybe longer. But I hate this rain.”

“It’s just a light drizzle now.”

“Lightning,” Trotter said. “The thought of lightning makes my bowels loose, and it ought to do the same to yours.”

“It’s inflated with helium, isn’t it?” Corky asked, indicating three discarded cylinders of compressed gas, each the size of a hospital oxygen tank. “The Hindenburg was hydrogen. I thought helium didn’t explode.”

“I’m not worried about an explosion.
I’m worried about being struck by lightning!
Even if lightning doesn’t rupture the bag and set it afire, it could fry us in the gondola.”

“The storm’s winding down. No lightning,” Corky observed.

“There was lightning earlier today.”

“Only a little. I told you, Trotter, we in government
control
the storm. When we want lightning, it strikes where we need it, and when we
don’t
want lightning, not one bolt leaves the quiver.”

In addition to being inflated with nonflammable helium instead of hydrogen, the blimp was different from a zeppelin in that it had no rigid internal structure. The skin of the
Hindenburg
—a vessel as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall, nearly as long as four Boeing 747s standing nose to tail—had been stretched around an elaborate steel frame that contained sixteen giant gas cells, great cotton sacks made airtight by a coating of plastic, as well as an entire luxury hotel. Trotter’s blimp, any blimp, was just a flat bag when deflated.

With no missing strawberries to obsess about and with no roller bearings to manipulate obsessively in one hand, a la Bogart in
The Caine Mutiny,
Captain Queeg von Hindenburg studied the slowly seething fog overhead, squinting to catch a glimpse of the clouds above the fog. He looked worried. He looked angry. With his orange hair pasted to his head by rain, his protuberant eyes, and his walrus mustache, he looked like a cartoon. “I don’t like this at all,” he muttered.