The Hammer of Eden (7 page)

He could not keep the grin off his face as he pulled out of the yard.

He drove out of town, moving up through the gears, and headed north, following the route Star had taken in the Honda.

As he approached the turnoff for the dump, he began to feel strange. He imagined Mario at the side of the road, with gray brains
seeping out of the hole in his head. It was a stupid, superstitious thought, but he could not shake it. His stomach churned. For a moment he felt weak, too weak to drive. Then he pulled himself together.

Mario was not the first man he had killed.

Jack Kassner had been a cop, and he had robbed Priest’s mother.

Priest’s mother had been a whore. She had been only thirteen years old when she gave birth to him. By the time Ricky was fifteen, she was working with three other women out of an apartment over a dirty bookstore on Seventh Street in the skid row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles. Jack Kassner was a vice squad detective who came once a month for his shakedown money. He usually took a free blow job at the same time. One day he saw Priest’s mother getting the bribe money out of the box in the back room. That night the vice squad raided the apartment, and Kassner stole fifteen hundred dollars, which was a lot of money in the sixties. Priest’s mother did not mind doing a few days in the slammer, but she was heartbroken to lose all the money she had saved. Kassner told the women that if they complained, he would slap them with drug-trafficking charges and they would all go down for a couple of years.

Kassner thought he was in no danger from three B-girls and a kid. But the next evening, as he stood in the men’s room of the Blue Light bar on Broadway, pissing away a few beers, little Ricky Granger stuck a razor-sharp six-inch knife in his back, easily slicing through the black mohair suit jacket and the white nylon shirt and penetrating the kidney. Kassner was in so much pain, he never got his hand on his gun. Ricky stabbed him several more times, quickly, as the cop lay on the wet concrete floor of the men’s room, vomiting blood; then he rinsed his blade under the tap and walked out.

Looking back, Priest marveled at the cool assurance of his fifteen-year-old self. It had taken only fifteen or twenty seconds, but during that time anyone might have stepped into the room. However, he had felt no fear, no shame, no guilt.

But after that he had been afraid of the dark.

He was not in the dark very much in those days. The lights usually
stayed on all night in his mother’s apartment. But sometimes he would wake up a little before dawn on a slow night, like a Monday, and find that everyone was asleep and the lights were out; and then he would be possessed by blind, irrational terror and would blunder around the room, bumping into furry creatures and touching strange clammy surfaces, until he found the light switch and sat on the edge of the bed, panting and perspiring, slowly recovering as he realized that the clammy surface was the mirror and the furry creature his fleece-lined jacket.

He had been afraid of the dark until he found Star.

He recalled a song that had been a hit the year he met her, and he began to sing: “Smoke on the water …” The band was Deep Purple, he recalled. Everyone was playing their album that summer.

It was a good apocalyptic song to sing at the wheel of a seismic vibrator.

Smoke on the water
A fire in the sky

He passed the entrance to the dump and drove on, heading north.

*  *  *

“We’ll do it tonight,” Priest had said. “We’ll tell the governor there’ll be an earthquake four weeks from today.”

Star was dubious. “We’re not even sure this is possible. Maybe we should do everything else first, get all our ducks lined up in a row,
then
issue the ultimatum.”

“Hell, no!” Priest said. The suggestion angered him. He knew that the group had to be led. He needed to get them committed. They had to go out on a limb, take a risk, and feel there was no turning back. Otherwise tomorrow they would think of reasons to get scared and back out.

They were fired up now. The letter had arrived today, and they were all angry and desperate. Star was grimly determined; Melanie was in a fury; Oaktree was ready to declare war; Paul Beale was reverting to his
street hoodlum type. Song had hardly spoken, but she was the helpless child of the group and would go along with the others. Only Aneth was opposed, and her opposition would be feeble because she was a weak person. She would be quick to raise objections, but she would back down even faster.

Priest himself knew with cold certainty that if this place ceased to exist, his life would be over.

Now Aneth said: “But an earthquake might kill people.”

Priest said: “I’ll tell you how I figure this will pan out. I guess we’ll have to cause a small, harmless tremor, out in the desert somewhere, just to prove we can do what we say. Then, when we threaten a second earthquake, the governor will negotiate.”

Aneth turned her attention back to her child.

Oaktree said: “I’m with Priest. Do it tonight.”

Star gave in. “How should we make the threat?”

“An anonymous phone call or letter, I guess,” Priest said. “But it has to be impossible to trace.”

Melanie said: “We could post it on an Internet bulletin board. If we used my laptop and mobile phone, no one could possibly trace it.”

Priest had never seen a computer until Melanie arrived. He threw a questioning glance at Paul Beale, who knew all about such things. Paul nodded and said: “Good idea.”

“All right,” Priest said. “Get your stuff.”

Melanie went off.

“How will we sign the message?” Star said. “We need a name.”

Song said: “Something that symbolizes a peace-loving group who have been driven to take extreme measures.”

“I know,” Priest said. “We’ll call ourselves the Hammer of Eden.”

It was just before midnight on the first of May.

*  *  *

Priest became tense as he reached the outskirts of San Antonio. In the original plan, Mario would have driven the truck as far as the airport. But now Priest was alone as he entered the maze of freeways that encircled the city, and he began to sweat.

There was no way he could read a map.

When he had to drive an unfamiliar road, he always took Star with him to navigate. She and the other Rice Eaters knew he could not read. The last time he drove alone on strange roads had been in the late autumn of 1972, when he fled from Los Angeles and finished up, by accident, at the commune in Silver River Valley. He had not cared where he went then. In fact, he would have been happy to die. But now he wanted to live.

Even road signs were difficult for him. If he stopped and concentrated for a while, he could tell the difference between “East” and “West” or “North” and “South.” Despite his remarkable ability to calculate in his head, he could not read numbers without staring hard and thinking long. With an effort, he could recognize signs for Route 10: a stick with a circle. But there was a lot of other stuff on road signs that meant nothing to him and confused the picture.

He tried to stay calm, but it was difficult. He liked to be in control. He was maddened by the sense of helplessness and bewilderment that came over him when he lost his way. He knew by the sun which way was north. When he felt he might be going wrong, he pulled into the next gas station or shopping mall and asked for directions. He hated doing it, for people noticed the seismic vibrator—it was a big rig, and the machinery on the back looked kind of intriguing—and there was a danger he would be remembered. But he had to take the risk.

And the directions were not always helpful. Gas station attendants would say things like “Yeah, easy, just follow Corpus Christi Highway until you see a sign for Brooks Air Force Base.”

Priest just forced himself to remain calm, keep asking questions, and hide his frustration and anxiety. He played the part of a friendly but stupid truck driver, the kind of person who would be forgotten by the next day. And eventually he got out of San Antonio on the right road, sending up prayers of thanks to whatever gods might be listening.

A few minutes later, passing through a small town, he was relieved to see the blue Honda parked at a McDonald’s restaurant.

He hugged Star gratefully. “What the hell happened?” she said worriedly. “I expected you a couple of hours ago!”

He decided not to tell her he had killed Mario. “I got lost in San Antonio,” he said.

“I was afraid of that. When I came through I was surprised how complicated the freeway system was.”

“I guess it’s not half as bad as San Francisco, but I know San Francisco.”

“Well, you’re here now. Let’s order coffee and get you calmed down.”

Priest bought a beanburger and got a free plastic clown, which he put carefully in his pocket for his six-year-old son, Smiler.

When they drove on, Star took the wheel of the truck. They planned to drive nonstop all the way to California. It would take at least two days and nights, maybe more. One would sleep while the other drove. They had some amphetamines to combat drowsiness.

They left the Honda in the McDonald’s lot. As they pulled away, Star handed Priest a paper bag, saying: “I got you a present.”

Inside was a pair of scissors and a battery-powered electric shaver.

“Now you can get rid of that damn beard,” she said.

He grinned. He turned the rearview mirror toward himself and started to cut. His hair grew fast and thick, and the bushy beard and mustache had made him round faced. Now his own face gradually reemerged. With the scissors he trimmed the hair down to a stubble, then he used the shaver to finish the job. Finally he took off his cowboy hat and undid his plait.

He threw the hat out the window and looked at his reflection. His hair was pushed back from a high forehead and fell in waves around a gaunt face. He had a nose like a blade and hollow cheeks, but he had a sensual mouth—many women had told him that. However, it was his eyes they usually talked about. They were dark brown, almost black, and people said they had a forceful, staring quality that could be mesmerizing. Priest knew it was not the eyes themselves, but the intensity of the look that could captivate a woman: he gave her the feeling that he was concentrating powerfully on her and nothing else. He could do it to men, too. He practiced the Look now, in the mirror.

“Handsome devil,” Star said—laughing at him, but in a nice way, affectionate.

“Smart, too,” Priest said.

“I guess you are. You got us this machine, anyway.”

Priest nodded. “And you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

2

I
n the Federal Building at 450 Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco, early on Monday morning, FBI agent Judy Maddox sat in a courtroom on the fifteenth floor, waiting.

The court was furnished in blond wood. New courtrooms always were. They generally had no windows, so the architects tried to make them brighter by using light colors. That was her theory. She spent a lot of time waiting in courtrooms. Most law enforcement personnel did.

She was worried. In court she was often worried. Months of work, sometimes years, went into preparing a case, but there was no telling how it would go once it got to court. The defense might be inspired or incompetent, the judge a sharp-eyed sage or a senile old fool, the jury a group of intelligent, responsible citizens or a bunch of lowlife jerks who ought to be behind bars themselves.

Four men were on trial today: John Parton, Ernest “Taxman” Dias, Foong Lee, and Foong Ho. The Foong brothers were the big-time crooks, the other two their executives. In cooperation with a Hong Kong triad, they had set up a network for laundering money from the Northern California dope industry. It had taken Judy a year to figure out how they were doing it and another year to prove it.

She had one big advantage when going after Asian crooks: she looked Oriental. Her father was a green-eyed Irishman, but she took
more after her late mother, who had been Vietnamese. Judy was slender and dark haired, with an upward slant to her eyes. The middle-aged Chinese gangsters she had been investigating had never suspected that this pretty little half-Asian girl was a hotshot FBI agent.

She was working with an assistant U.S. attorney whom she knew unusually well. His name was Don Riley, and until a year ago they had been living together. He was her age, thirty-six, and he was experienced, energetic, and as smart as a whip.

She had thought they had a watertight case. But the accused men had hired the top criminal law firm in the city and put together a clever, vigorous defense. Their lawyers had undermined the credibility of witnesses who were, inevitably, from the criminal milieu themselves; and they had exploited the documentary evidence amassed by Judy to confuse and bewilder the jury.

Now neither Judy nor Don could guess which way it would go.

Judy had a special reason to be worried about this case. Her immediate boss, the supervisor of the Asian Organized Crime squad, was about to retire, and she had applied for the job. The overall head of the San Francisco office, the special agent in charge, or SAC, would support her application, she knew. But she had a rival: Marvin Hayes, another high-flying agent in her age group. And Marvin also had powerful support: his best friend was the assistant special agent in charge responsible for all the organized crime and white-collar crime squads.

Promotions were granted by a career board, but the opinions of the SAC and ASACs carried a lot of weight. Right now the contest between Judy and Marvin Hayes was close.

She wanted that job. She wanted to rise far and fast in the FBI. She was a good agent, she would be an outstanding supervisor, and one of these days she would be the best SAC the bureau had ever had. She was proud of the FBI, but she knew she could make it better: with faster introduction of new techniques like profiling through the use of streamlined management systems and—most of all—by getting rid of agents like Marvin Hayes.

Hayes was the old-fashioned type of law enforcement officer: lazy, brutal, and unscrupulous. He had not put as many bad guys in jail as Judy, but he had made more high-profile arrests. He was good at insinuating himself into a glamorous investigation and quick to distance himself from a case that was going south.