The Face (51 page)

No Fric.

The reading nook farthest from the library entrance included not only armchairs but also a worktable with a telephone and a computer.

Although the outgoing lines were no longer working, the in-house intercom was a function of the system separate from phone service. Only a power failure could disable it.

Ethan pressed the button labeled
INTERCOM,
then pressed
HOUSE,
and broke one of Mrs. McBee’s cardinal rules by paging the boy from the third floor to the lower garage. His summons issued from the speaker in every phone in the mansion: “Fric? Where are you, Fric? Wherever you are, speak to me.”

He waited. Five seconds was an excruciatingly long time. Ten equaled eternity.

“Fric? Talk to me, Fric!”

Beside the telephone, the computer switched on. Ethan hadn’t touched it.

The ghost operating the computer accessed the house-control program. Instead of presenting him with the usual three columns of icons, the screen immediately revealed the floor plan of the ground level of the mansion, the eastern half.

Before him, unbidden, was the motion-detector display. A blip, signifying movement and body heat, blinked in the conservatory.

Seventy-four feet in diameter, forty-eight feet from floor to ceiling, the conservatory was a jungle with windows, tall panels of leaded glass, salvaged from a palace in France that had been mostly destroyed in World War One.

Here Mr. Yorn and his men maintained and continually refreshed a collection of exotic palm trees, tulip trees, frangipanis, mimosas, many species of ferns, spaths, smithianthas, orchids, and a shitload of other plants that Fric was not able to identify. Narrow pathways of decomposed granite wound through the curbed planters.

A few steps after you entered the green maze, the illusion of tropical wilderness was complete. You could pretend to be lost in Africa, on the trail of the rare albino gorilla or in search of the lost diamond mines of King Solomon.

Fric called it Giungla Rospo, which was Italian for “Toad Jungle,” and felt that it had all the cool stuff of a real tropical forest but none of the bad. No humongous insects, no snakes, no monkeys in the trees, shrieking and throwing their crap at your head.

At the center of its carefully orchestrated wildness, Giungla Rospo offered a gazebo built of bamboo and bubinga wood. There you could have dinner or get puking drunk if you were old enough, or just pretend to be Tarzan before the nuisance of Jane.

Fourteen feet in diameter, raised five feet above the floor of the conservatory, reached by eight wooden steps, the gazebo held a round table and four chairs. A secret panel in the floor, when slid aside, revealed the door to a small refrigerator stocked with Coke, beer, and bottles of natural spring water, though not so natural that it came with dysentery, typhoid fever, cholera, or ravenous parasites that would eat you alive from the inside out.

Another secret panel, when slid aside, provided access to the five-foot-high space under the gazebo. This allowed the refrigerator to be serviced if it broke down, and made it possible for the guys with the monthly pest-control service to get under the gazebo and ensure that no nasty spiders or disease-bearing mice would establish nests in this cozy dark refuge.

Dark it was. During the day, no hint of sunshine penetrated to the subgazebo den, which meant at night the quake lights would not be seen from outside if the conservatory lamps were all extinguished.

Bringing doughnuts, other noiseless foods, foil-wrapped moist towelettes, and Rubbermaid chamber pots, Fric earlier in the day had claimed this as his deep and special secret place. With Moloch in the house, he now sat powwow-style, legs crossed, in this bubinga bunker, which his guardian angel apparently believed would save him from that eater of children.

He had been in his hideaway less than two minutes, listening to his heart mimic runaway horses, when he heard something other than the stampede in his chest. Footsteps. Ascending to the gazebo.

More likely than not, it was Mr. Truman, looking for him. Mr. Truman. Not Moloch. Not a child-eating beast with baby bones in its teeth. Just Mr. Truman.

On a tour, the footsteps circled the platform, first moving toward the concealed panel, then away. But then toward it again.

Fric held his breath.

The footsteps halted. The tongue-and-groove planks creaked overhead as the man above shifted his weight.

Fric silently poured out the staleness in his lungs, silently eased fresh air in, and held this breath, as well.

The creaking stopped and was followed by subtle sounds: a faint brushing, a soft scrape, a click.

Now would be a bad time for an asthma attack.

Fric almost screamed out loud at himself for being so stupid as to think such a stupid thought at a dangerous time like this. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Only in movies did the asthmatic kid or the diabetic kid, or the epileptic kid, suffer a seizure at the worst of all possible moments. Only in movies, not in real life. This was real life or at least something that passed for it.

Did he feel an itchiness between his shoulders? Spreading to the back of his neck? A real itch would be a sign of an impending asthma attack. An imaginary itch would be a sign that he was a totally lame, lily-livered, hopelessly feeble geek.

Directly above him, the secret panel slid open.

He found himself face to face with Moloch, who was evidently smarter than Fric’s guardian angel: a freckle-faced guy with jackal eyes and a big grin. No splinters of baby bones in his teeth.

Brandishing the six-inch blade that he had requisitioned from Mr. Hachette’s cutlery drawer, Fric warned, “I’ve got a knife.”

“And I’ve got this,” said Moloch, producing a tiny aerosol can the size of a pepper-spray container. He blasted Fric in the face with a cold stream of stuff that tasted like nutmeg and that smelled like undiluted civet probably smelled.

CHAPTER 93

A
T NIGHT, THE CONSERVATORY WAS MAGICALLY illuminated: every golden nimbus, starry twinkle, and silken scarf of faux moonlight as enchanting as the finest Hollywood wizards of stage lighting could design. After sunset, with the flip of a switch, a mere pocket jungle became this tropical Shangri-la.

Entering, pistol in a two-hand grip, Ethan didn’t call out to Fric. The blip he’d seen on the motion-sensor display in the library might not have been the boy.

He was unable to imagine how the estate grounds and then the house could have been penetrated without setting off numerous alarms. But the idea of an intruder getting into Palazzo Rospo astonished him far less than other things he’d witnessed lately.

The loose pebbles in the decomposed-granite pathways crunched under him, making a stealthy search impossible. He stepped carefully to minimize noise. The tiny, shifting bits of stone provided unstable footing.

He didn’t like the shadows, either. Shadows, shadows everywhere in layered complexity, calculated for dramatic effect, unnatural and therefore double deceiving.

Nearing the center of the jungle, Ethan heard a strange sound,
thhhup,
and then again,
thhhup,
and heard greenery click-rustle-snap, but he didn’t realize that he was being shot at until the bole of a palm tree took a bullet inches in front of his face, spraying him with flecks of its green tissue.

He dropped fast and flat. He rolled off the path and crawled through ferns and pittosporum, through mimulus drenched with red-purple flowers, into sheltering gloom where he was grateful for all shadows, natural and not.

The jakes arrived before the ambulance, and after Hazard briefed them and told them where to send the paramedics, he went upstairs to look after Maxwell Dalton.

The withered man, more hideously emaciated on third sight than he had appeared to be on first and second, rolled his sunken eyes and grimaced, greatly agitated, struggling to cough up barbed words from his no doubt cracked and bleeding throat.

“Easy, easy now,” Hazard said. “Calm down. Everything’s going to be all right now. You’re safe now, Professor.”

The hooked edges of the words pained Dalton as he spat them out, but he insisted on saying, “He’s…coming…back.”

“Good,” Hazard said, grateful to hear the ambulance siren rising in the night beyond the broken window. “We know just what to do with the sick son of a bitch when he shows up.”

Greatly distressed, Dalton managed to roll his head side to side and produce an anguished mewling.

Thinking Dalton might be worried about his wife and daughter, Hazard revealed that he had just sent a pair of uniformed officers to their house not only to inform Rachel that her husband had been found alive but also to give her and Emily protection until Laputa could be located and arrested.

In a hiss-and-hack voice, Dalton said, “Coming back with,” and winced in pain as his throat seized up.

“Don’t stress yourself,” Hazard advised. “You’re pretty fragile right now.”

At the end of the block, the shrieking ambulance turned the corner. The rainy night licked away and swallowed the last shrill note of the siren as the brakes barked on the blacktop in front of the house.

“Bringing back…a boy,” Dalton said.

“A boy?” Hazard asked. “You mean Laputa?”

Dalton managed a nod.

“He told you?”

Another nod.

“Said he was bringing a boy back here tonight?”

“Yes.”

As he heard the paramedics thundering up the steps, Hazard leaned closer to the withered man and said, “What boy?”

Crouching among mimulus and Mauna Loa spaths and ferns, Ethan heard a second burst of fire, three or four shots, from a weapon fitted with a sound suppressor, and after half a minute of silence, a third burst.

None of these rounds seemed to come near him. The gunman must have lost track of him. Or maybe the guy had never known where Ethan was, had fired blindly through the jungle, and had come close with the first spray of bullets solely by chance.

Gunman—singular. Guy—one.

Common sense argued that an assault against this estate required teamwork, that one man couldn’t jump the wall, deceive the electronic security measures, disable the guards, and breach the house. That was Bruce Willis on the big screen. That was Tom Cruise in makeup. That was Channing Manheim playing a role from the dark side. That wasn’t anyone real.

If a coordinated team of kidnappers had gotten inside Palazzo Rospo, however, there would be more than one gunman squeezing off short bursts of suppressing fire. They would have chopped at Ethan with one, two, three fully automatic carbines. Uzis or worse. By now he would be down, dead, and dancing in paradise.

When silence persisted after the third brief volley, he rose from cover and eased warily through the ferns, between the palms, to the edge of the pathway.

In any jungle movie, stillness like this always signaled the wilderness-savvy characters that villainy in one form or another had stepped into the natural world, silencing cricket and crocodile alike.

Green-juice smell of crushed vegetation rising from underfoot.

Muffled voice of a heating-system fan purring in the walls.

A gnat, a midge, hovering in the air before him, hovering.

Taste of blood in his mouth, the discovery that he’d pinched tongue with teeth when he dropped to the ground, the throb just now arising in the bite.

A flutter of foliage spun him around, and he brought the pistol toward the sound.

Not foliage. Wings. Through the jungle, high above the pathway, flew a flock of brightly colored parrots, blue and red and yellow and the iridescent green of certain strange sunsets.

No birds made their home in the conservatory. Neither a flock of parrots nor a single sparrow.

Plummeting in front of Ethan but then swooping high again, the colorful birds passed without one screech or squawk, and became white doves on the rise.

This was the phantom in the steam-clouded mirror. This was the impossible set of bells in his hand outside the flower shop. This was the heavy fragrance of Broadway roses in his study when no roses had been there, the precious voice of his lost wife speaking of ladybugs in the white room. This was the hand of some supernatural force held out to him and eager to lead.

After spiraling high in a frenzied flapping, down again came the swarming doves, feathering the air, toward him, past him, with a
thrum
that both exhilarated and frightened him, that plucked notes of wonder from his heart but also struck hard the jungle-drum terror of the primitive within.

They flew. He ran. They led. He followed.

“Wait,” Hazard told the paramedics as they came quickly to the bed in spite of the vile stink, as they stood wide-eyed and gaping in spite of all the horrors that they had seen day after day in the conduct of their vital work.

“Boy,” Dalton croaked.

“What boy?” Hazard asked, having taken the withered man’s hand once more, holding it in both of his.

“Ten,” said Dalton.

“Ten boys?”

“Ten…years.”

“A ten-year-old boy,” Hazard said, failing to understand why Dalton thought Laputa meant to return here with a boy, not sure that he was correctly interpreting what the wracked man meant to tell him.

Dalton strained to speak in spite of throat pain that threatened to convulse him: “Said…famous.”

“Famous?”

“Said…famous
boy.”

And Hazard
knew.

In the elevator, Moloch dropped Fric, and Fric tumbled in a loose heap on the floor, not sure what had happened to him. No mere pepper in that pepper spray. He could see but could not turn his eyes with the usual quickness, could blink but only slowly. He was able to move his arms and legs, but as though straining against the pressure of deep water, like a weary swimmer being pulled down by a relentless undertow. He couldn’t strike a blow in self-defense, couldn’t even fully close his hand into a fist.

As they descended toward the garage, Moloch grinned at Fric and brandished the little aerosol can at him. “Short-acting semiparalytic inhalant developed by a colleague with the help of a generous grant from the Iranian secret police. I wanted you docile but
alert.”

Fric heard himself breathing. Not an asthmatic wheeze.

“That gazebo didn’t appear on the architectural plans,” said Moloch. “But the moment I saw it, I
knew.
I’m still in touch with the child in me, the wild spirit that we are when we’re born, and I
knew.”

Fric didn’t hear the sound of healthy breathing, either. Clear but shallow, a faint whistle in his throat.

With scary face-twitching spasms of glee that would have caused Fric’s bladder to empty in a rush if he had not such a short time ago relieved himself on the potted palm, Moloch said, “I wanted you alert to experience all the terror of being snatched out of your posh digs, knowing that your big-shot daddy can’t swoop down in cape and tights or on a flying motorcycle like you once thought he could. Not all the muscled movie stars in the world, certainly not all the supermodels, not even all the beefed-up bodyguards in Bel Air can save your pampered ass.”

Fric knew then that he was going to die. No chance to sneak off to Goose Crotch, Montana. No hope of someday leading a real life. But maybe at last some peace.