The Face (52 page)

As the shepherd to the sheep, as the hound to the posse, as the scout to the cavalry, the doves showed Ethan the way, bird by bird, out of the conservatory, into the east hall, past the indoor pool, to the north hall and then westward toward the rotunda.

Such a sight: thirty or forty luminous-white birds flowing along the corridor, a feathered river in this canyon of sumptuous decor, as might a party of freed spirits soar toward Valhalla.

Into the entry rotunda they flew, and circled there as if caught in the whirlpool currents of a forming cyclone, until Ethan caught up with them, whereupon the many birds swarmed closer to one another, closer, until they knitted together in one turbulent entity. They flowed down from the three-story heights to the floor, changing color as they came, changing form again, becoming that friend of childhood who had lost his way.

Standing but ten feet from Ethan, the apparition that was Dunny Whistler said, “If you die this time, I can’t bring you back. I am at the limits of my authority. He’s taking Fric down to the garage. He’s almost out of here.”

Before Ethan could speak, dead Dunny was not Dunny anymore, but doves again, exploding in a glory of radiant wings, knifing straight at the enormous Christmas tree. They fled not into the needled boughs but into the silvery and scarlet shine of the ornaments, no longer birds but only the shadows of birds, darkening across the glimmering curves, then gone.

By a fistful of his shirt, semiparalytic Fric was dragged across the garage floor, facing away from his captor, watching the elevator alcove recede into the distance.

Moloch had snared car keys from the pegboard, where every set hung under a label citing the make, model, and year. The kidnapper seemed to know his way around as well as if he had lived in Palazzo Rospo.

Also receding from Fric was his medicinal inhaler, his precious asthma drug. The device had come unclipped from his belt. He tried to grab the inhaler when first it rattled loose, but his limbs were jelly.

Moloch might be insane or just evil. But Fric couldn’t imagine what the Iranian secret police had against him.

In his ten years, he had known fear. In fact it had been nearly a constant. The fear familiar to him for so long, however, had been of the quiet variety, a nagging rather than threatening force, more like the persistent pecking of small birds than like the rending ferocity of a pterodactyl. Worry that his father’s absences would grow ever longer, until they stretched into years, like those of his mother. A gnawing concern that he would forever be the geek that he was now, that he would never figure out what to do with life or with himself, that he would grow old and still be more than anything else the son of Channing Manheim, the Face. During every second of the journey between the conservatory and the garage, however, a great dark terror thrashed its leathery wings in the cage of his heart, swooped through the hollows of body and soul, shivered flesh and blood, and bone.

For his getaway, Moloch could have chosen from the collection any of the older classic cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Instead he selected a more recent model, a favorite of Fric’s: the cherry-red 1951 Buick Super 8, with chromed fins and fender wings.

He heaved Fric into the front passenger’s seat, slammed the door, hurried around the Buick, and got in behind the wheel. The engine started at once because every vehicle in the collection was maintained in perfect condition.

Guardian angels apparently could not be relied on in a pinch. Mysterious Caller had never seemed much like an angel, anyway: too spooky looking, his style too ominous, and such sorrow in his eyes.

As Moloch backed out of the parking stall, Fric wondered what had happened to Mr. Truman. He must be dead. When he focused on the thought of Mr. Truman dead, Fric discovered that the semiparalytic inhalant didn’t prevent him from crying.

Entering the upper garage by way of the stairs, Ethan heard the growl of an engine, smelled exhaust fumes.

The Buick was poised for flight at the foot of the exit ramp, where the garage door had almost finished rolling up and out of its way.

A man behind the wheel. One man. No accomplices in the backseat. No gunmen elsewhere in the garage.

The passenger’s side of the car was nearest to Ethan as he ran toward it. Against the side window at the front, Fric’s tousled head was tipped against the glass. He couldn’t see the boy’s face, but the head seemed to loll, as if Fric were unconscious.

Ethan almost reached the Buick before the rising door provided clearance. Then the car jumped toward the door and the ramp beyond at such acceleration that a man on foot couldn’t catch it.

Stepping from a run into an isosceles shooting stance, squarely facing the target, right leg quartering back for balance, left knee flexed, both hands on the weapon, Ethan risked three quick shots, aiming low in fear of hitting Fric with a ricochet, targeting the rear tire on the passenger’s side.

The fender skirt shielded almost half the wheel, giving him a narrow window in which to place the shot. One round pocked metal, one went wide, but one popped the tire.

The car sagged back and to one side. Kept going. Still too fast to be chased down. The
slap-slap-slap
of loose rubber marked its ascent along the lower half of the ramp.

The quartzite paving provided good traction, dry or wet, but the Buick’s rear tires spun briefly, churning up a spray of dirty water and blue smoke, maybe because of the cant to the right.

As Ethan closed the gap once more, the Buick found its footing, lunged forward, upward. Spin-shredded rubber flapped louder than before, and the exposed wheel rim bit at the quartzite with a sound like a stone saw cutting cobbles.

When Ethan reached the top of the ramp, he saw the car following the driveway along the side of the mansion. Heading toward the front. Forty feet away. Making speed in spite of being crippled. Nothing to stop it from grinding all the way to the distant gate, which opened automatically from the inside when sensors buried in the pavement of the exit lane detected traffic.

Ethan gave chase. He couldn’t catch the car. No hope.

He pursued anyway because he could do nothing else. Too late to go back, get keys, another car. By the time he was driving out of the garage, the Buick would have cleared the main gate and vanished. He ran, ran, splashing through cold puddles, ran, pumping his arms and trying to compensate for the weight, the bulk, of the pistol in his right hand, because running well was a matter of balance, ran, ran, because if Fric were killed, then Ethan Truman would be a dead man, too, dead inside, and would spend the rest of his time in this world looking for a grave, a walking corpse as sure as Dunny Whistler ever had been.

CHAPTER 94

C
ORKY LAPUTA, PLEASED TO BE PROVING THAT Robin Goodfellow was as daring and as formidable as any
real
agent of the NSA, had always intended to leave the estate in one of the actor’s expensive classic cars. The complication of a blown tire would not force a change of plan; it qualified as a mere annoyance.

The ride was rough, the steering wheel pulled stubbornly in his hands, but as a connoisseur of chaos and a master of disorder, he met this challenge with the delight familiar to any child who had fought to control a vehicle in the bumper-car pavilion at a carnival. Every twitch and wobble gave him a thrill.

He needed only to nurse the Buick out of the gate and three blocks to the street on which he had parked the Acura. From there, the drive home would be quick. Within half an hour, the pampered boy would be introduced to Stinky Cheese Man, would understand the horror that he was about to inherit, and would begin his long ordeal as well as his own career as a media star.

If anything went wrong en route, if for the first time chaos failed to serve Corky, he would kill the boy rather than surrender him to anyone. He wouldn’t even use young Manheim as a trade for his own survival. Cowardice had no place in the valiant lives of those who would usher in the collapse of society and raise a new world from the rubble.

“Anyone stops me,” he promised the kid, “I’ll blow your brains out—
pop, pop, pop
—and make you the biggest object of worldwide mourning since Princess Di.”

He made the corner of the house. At some distance to the left lay the reflection pond at the center of the turnaround in front of the mansion. He was still traveling on the tributary driveway, which would join the main drive in fifty or sixty yards.

Just beyond the reach of the headlights, something so strange occurred that Corky cried out in surprise, and when the twin beams revealed the true nature of the obstacle ahead, terror seized him. He jammed his foot down on the brakes so hard that he put the car into a spin.

Moloch said that he would blow Fric’s brains out, but Fric had more immediate worries because the itching between his shoulders was real this time, not imaginary, and it quickly spread to the back of his neck.

He had expected to suffer an attack the moment that he’d been spritzed in the face, but perhaps the drug that Moloch administered had, as a side effect, delayed the asthmatic response. Now here it came, and with a vengeance.

Fric began to wheeze. His chest tightened, and he couldn’t get enough breath.

He didn’t have his inhaler.

As bad, maybe worse: He remained semiparalyzed, unable to claw himself up from a slack-limbed slump into a full sitting position. He had to be more upright to use the muscles of his chest walls and of his neck to squeeze out every trapped breath.

Worse still: The feeble effort he made to sit upright instead caused him to slide farther down. In fact he seemed about to slip off the seat. His legs buckled and twisted upon themselves, folding into the knee space in front of the dashboard, and his butt hung off the edge of the seat. From the waist to his neck, he was lying flat on the seat, his head tipped up against the back of it.

He felt his airways narrowing.

He wheezed, sucked, snorked for breath, drew in little, squeezed out less. That familiar hard-boiled egg settled in his windpipe, that stone, that blocking wad.

He could not breathe on his back.

He could not breathe. He could not breathe.

Moloch stomped the brakes. The car fishtailed, then spun.

On the driveway, running toward Corky as he sped toward them, were Roman Castevet, whom he’d killed and stored under a sheet in the cold locker at the morgue, and Ned Hokenberry come back to retrieve the locket that contained his third eye, and anorexic Brittina Dowd as naked and bony as he had left her on the floor of her bedroom but not burnt, and Mick Sachatone in Bart Simpson pajamas.

He should have known them for mirages, should have boldly run them down, but never had he seen the like of this, nor dreamed that such a thing was possible. They were not transparent but appeared to be as solid as a fireplace poker or a bronze-and-marble lamp.

Tramping the brake pedal, he jammed too hard, and perhaps pulled the wheel without intention. The Buick whipped around so sharply that the pistol on his lap was flung to the floor at his feet and his head rapped the side window hard enough to crack it.

At the end of the 360-degree pivot, his four victims had not vanished during the rotation, but loomed
right there,
and all flung themselves at the car, shocking from Corky a scream that sounded too girlish for Robin Goodfellow. One, two, three, four, the angry dead burst against the windshield, against the cracked side window, eager to be at him, but
burst
, not real after all, merely figures of rain and shadow, plumes of cast-up water that splashed into shapeless sprays, flowed away, were gone.

A full turn didn’t drain the Buick’s momentum, and they spun another ninety degrees, colliding with one of the trees that lined the driveway, thereby brought to an abrupt stop as the passenger’s door sprung open and the windshield dissolved.

Laughing in the face of chaos, Corky reached down past the steering wheel, feeling for the Glock on the floor between his feet. He touched the handgrip of the gun, grasped it, brought the weapon up to shoot the boy.

The driver’s door opened with a shrill protest of buckled metal, and Ethan Truman reached in for Corky, so instead of shooting the boy, he shot the man.

Arriving at the Buick in the moment that it crashed to a stop, Ethan slammed his pistol down on the roof and left it there because he didn’t want to shoot into the car, not with Fric in the line of fire. Heedless of the risk, he yanked open the tweaked door and reached inside. The driver thrust a handgun at him—
thhhup
—and he not only saw the muzzle flash but also
smelled
it.

He felt no consequence in the instant of the shot, too focused on the struggle for the gun to be able to assess whether he’d been hit or not. He swore he felt the second shot part his hair, and then he had the pistol.

At once flinging the weapon away into the dark, he would have dragged the driver out of the Buick, but the bastard came without coaxing, barreling into him. They both went down harder than gravity required, Ethan on the bottom, rapping the back of his head against the quartzite cobblestones.

On impact, when the door flew open, Fric found himself sliding off the seat, out of the Buick, onto the puddled pavement. Flat on his back, the worst of all positions when he couldn’t breathe.

Rain falling in his eyes blurred his vision, but he worried less about the blurring than about a crimson tint that seeped across the night, making rubies of the raindrops.

His thoughts clouded to match his vision—too little oxygen to the brain—but he was clearheaded enough to realize that the effect of the crap he had inhaled might be wearing off. He tried to move, and could, but not with any grace or control, rather like a hooked fish flopping on a shore.

On his side, he had more ability to clench and relax his neck, chest, and abdominal muscles, which he must do in order to force out the stale air condensed like syrup in his lungs. More ability, but not enough. If paper were a sound, it would not be as thin as his wheeze had become, nor a human hair as thin, nor a film of dust.

He needed to sit up. He couldn’t.

He needed his inhaler. Gone.

Although the world was crimson to him, he knew that he must look blue to the world, for this was one of the really bad attacks, worse than any he’d known before, an occasion for the emergency room, for the doctors and nurses with their talk of Manheim movies.

No breath. No breath. Thirty-five thousand dollars to refurnish his rooms, but no breath.

Funny thoughts crowded his head. Not funny ha-ha. Funny scary. Red thoughts. So dark red at the edges that the red was really black.

Currently not in a mood to teach the deconstructionist theory of literature, but in a mood to deconstruct anything in his way, with a wolfish fury howling in his skull, Corky
needed
to gouge eyes, to chew at the face below him, to tear with teeth, to claw and rip.

Cracking his jaws for the first bite, he realized that Truman had been stunned when he rapped his head on the pavement, that his resistance was not as strong as expected. In his savage frenzy, Corky dimly realized, too, that if he succumbed to the animalistic urge to finish this by tooth and nail, something would snap in him, some last organizing restraint, and he would be found hours hence, still bent to the savaged body of his victim, his snout and jowls in the fleshy ruins, searching for grisly morsels as a pig for truffles.

As Robin Goodfellow, who had not actually received training to be a lethal weapon but who had read his share of spy novels, he knew that a sharp blow with the heel of his hand to an enemy’s nose would shatter nasal bones and drive the wicked splinters into the brain, bringing instant death, and so he did this, and cried with delight as Truman’s blood answered the blow with a bright spray.

He rolled off the useless cop, rose, turned toward the Buick, and went looking for the boy. Corky leaned down at the driver’s door to peer inside, but Fric had apparently gotten out through the sprung door on the passenger’s side.