Oslett dreaded reporting the bad news to the home office in New York. The organization didn’t kill the bearer of bad tidings, especially not if his surname happened to be Oslett. However, as Alfie’s primary handler, he knew that some of the blame would stick to him even though the operative’s rebellion was not his fault to any degree whatsoever. The error must be in Alfie’s fundamental conditioning, damn it, not in his handling.
Leaving Clocker in the kitchen to keep a lookout for unwanted visitors, Oslett quickly inspected the rest of the motorhome.
He found nothing else of interest except a pile of discarded clothes on the floor of the main bedroom at the back of the vehicle. In the beam of the flashlight, he needed to disturb the garments only slightly with the toe of his shoe to see that they were what Alfie had been wearing when he had boarded the plane for Kansas City on Saturday morning.
Oslett returned to the kitchen, where Clocker waited in the dark. He turned the flashlight on the dead pensioners one last time. “What a mess. Damn it, this didn’t have to happen.”
Referring disdainfully to the murdered couple, Clocker said, “Who cares, for God’s sake? They were nothing but a couple of fucking Klingons anyway.”
Oslett had been referring not to the victims but to the fact that Alfie was more than merely a renegade now, was an untraceable renegade, thus jeopardizing the organization and everyone in it. He had no more pity for the dead man and woman than did Clocker, felt no responsibility for what had happened to them, and figured the world, in fact, was better off without two more non-productive parasites sucking on the substance of society and hindering traffic in their lumbering home on wheels. He had no love for the masses. As he saw it, the basic problem with the average man and woman was precisely that they were so average and that there were so many of them, taking far more than they gave to the world, quite incapable of managing their own lives intelligently let alone society, government, the economy, and the environment.
Nevertheless, he was alarmed by the way Clocker had phrased his contempt for the victims. The word “Klingons” made him uneasy because it was the name of the alien race that had been at war with humanity through so many television episodes and movies in the Star Trek series before events in that fictional far future had begun to reflect the improvement of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union in the real world. Oslett found Star Trek tedious, insufferably boring. He never had understood why so many people had such a passion for it. But Clocker was an ardent fan of the series, unabashedly called himself a “Trekker,” could reel off the plots of every movie and episode ever filmed, and knew the personal histories of every character as if they were all his dearest friends. Star Trek was the only topic about which he seemed willing or able to conduct a conversation; and as taciturn as he was most of the time, he was to the same degree garrulous when the subject of his favorite fantasy arose.
Oslett tried to make sure that it never arose.
Now, in his mind, the dreaded word “Klingons” clanged like a firehouse bell.
With the entire organization at risk because Alfie’s trail had been lost, with something new and exquisitely violent loose in the world, the return trip to Oklahoma City through so many miles of lightless and unpeopled land was going to be bleak and depressing. The last thing Oslett needed was to be assaulted by one of Clocker’s exhaustingly enthusiastic monologues about Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Scotty, the rest of the crew, and their adventures in the far reaches of a universe that was, on film, stuffed with far more meaning and moments of sophomoric enlightenment than was the real universe of hard choices, ugly truths, and mindless cruelty.
“Let’s get out of here,” Oslett said, pushing past Clocker and heading for the front of the Road King. He didn’t believe in God, but he prayed nonetheless ardently that Karl Clocker would subside into his usual self-absorbed silence.
6
Cyrus Lowbock excused himself temporarily to confer with some colleagues who wanted to talk to him elsewhere in the house.
Marty was relieved by his departure.
When the detective left the dining room, Paige returned from the window and sat once more in the chair beside Marty.
Although the Pepsi was gone, some of the ice cubes had melted in the mug, and he drank the cold water. “All I want now is to put an end to this. We shouldn’t be here, not with that guy out there somewhere, loose.”
“Do you think we should be worried about the kids?”
... need . . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .
Marty said, “Yeah. I’m worried shitless.”
“But you shot the guy twice in the chest.”
“I thought I’d left him in the foyer with a broken back, too, but he got up and ran away. Or limped away. Or maybe even vanished into thin air. I don’t know what the hell’s going on here, Paige, but it’s wilder than anything I’ve ever put in a novel. And it’s not over, not by a long shot.”
“If it was just Vic and Kathy looking after them, but there’s a cop over there too.”
“If this bastard knew where the girls were, he’d waste that cop, Vic, and Kathy in about a minute flat.”
“You handled him.”
“I was lucky, Paige. Just damned lucky. He never imagined I had a gun in the desk drawer or that I’d use one if I had it. I took him by surprise. He won’t let that happen again. He’ll have all the surprise on his side.”
He tilted the mug to his lips, let a melting ice cube slide onto his tongue.
“Marty, when did you take the guns out of the garage cabinet and load them?”
Speaking around the ice cube, he said, “I saw how that jolted you. I did it this morning. Before I went to see Paul Guthridge.”
“Why?”
As best he could, Marty described the curious feeling he’d had that something was bearing down on him and was going to destroy him before he even got a chance to identify it. He tried to convey how the feeling intensified into a panic attack, until he was certain he would need guns to defend himself and became almost incapacitated by fear.
He would have been embarrassed to tell her, would have sounded unbalanced—if events had not proved the validity of his perceptions and precautions.
“And something was coming,” she said. “This dead-ringer. You sensed him coming.”
“Yeah. I guess so. Somehow.”
“Psychic.”
He shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t call it that. Not if you mean a psychic vision. There wasn’t any vision. I didn’t see what was coming, didn’t have a clear premonition. Just this . . . this awful sense of pressure, gravity . . . like on one of those whip rides at an amusement park, when it swings you around real fast and you’re pinned to the seat, feel a weight on your chest. You know, you’ve been on rides like that, Charlotte always loves them.”
“Yeah. I understand . . . I guess.”
“This started out like that . . . and got a hundred times worse, until I could hardly breathe. Then suddenly it just stopped as I was leaving for the doctor’s office. And later, when I came home, the sonofabitch was here, but I didn’t feel anything when I walked into the house.”
They were silent for a moment.
Wind flung pellets of rain against the window.
Paige said, “How could he look exactly like you?”