In the Oslett family, certain lessons were learned so young that Drew almost felt as if he’d been born with that knowledge, and a profound understanding of the value of the Oslett name seemed rooted in his genes. Nothing—except a vast fortune—was as precious as a good name, maintained through generations; from a good name sprang as much power as from tremendous wealth, because politicians and judges found it easier to accept briefcases full of cash, by way of bribery, when the offerings came from people whose bloodline had produced senators, secretaries of state, leaders of industry, noted champions of the environment, and much-lauded patrons of the arts.
His pairing with Clocker was simply a mistake. Eventually he would have the situation rectified. If the Network bureaucracy was slow to rearrange assignments, and if their renegade was recovered in a condition that still allowed him to be handled as before, Oslett would take Alfie aside and instruct him to terminate Clocker.
The paperback Star Trek novel, spine broken, lay open on Karl Clocker’s chest, pages down. Careful not to wake the big man, Oslett picked up the book.
He turned to the first page, not bothering to mark Clocker’s stopping place, and began to read, thinking that perhaps he would get a clue as to why so many people were fascinated by the starship Enterprise and its crew. Within a few paragraphs, the damned author was taking him inside the mind of Captain Kirk, mental territory that Oslett was willing to explore only if his alternatives were otherwise limited to the stultifying minds of all the presidential candidates in the last election. He skipped ahead a couple of chapters, dipped in, found himself in Spock’s prissily rational mind, skipped more pages and discovered he was in the mind of “Bones” McCoy.
Annoyed, he closed Journey to the Rectum of the Universe, or whatever the hell the book was called, and slapped Clocker’s chest with it to wake him.
The big man sat straight up so suddenly that his porkpie hat popped off and landed in his lap. Sleepily, he said, “Wha? Wha?”
“We’ll be landing soon.”
“Of course we will,” Clocker said.
“There’s a contact meeting us.”
“Life is contact.”
Oslett was in a foul mood. Chasing a renegade assassin, thinking about his father, pondering the possible catastrophe represented by Martin Stillwater, reading several pages of a Star Trek novel, and now being peppered with more of Clocker’s cryptograms was too much for any man to bear and still be expected to keep his good humor. He said, “Either you’ve been drooling in your sleep, or a herd of snails just crawled over your chin and into your mouth.”
Clocker raised one burly arm and wiped the lower part of his face with his shirt sleeve.
“This contact,” Oslett said, “might have a lead on Alfie by now. We have to be sharp, ready to move. Are you fully awake?”
Clocker’s eyes were rheumy. “None of us is ever fully awake.”
“Oh, please, will you cut that half-baked mystical crap? I just don’t have any patience for that right now.”
Clocker stared at him a long moment and then said, “You’ve got a turbulent heart, Drew.”
“Wrong. It’s my stomach that’s turbulent from having to listen to this crap.”
“An inner tempest of blind hostility.”
“Fuck you,” Oslett said.
The pitch of the jet engines changed subtly. A moment later the stewardess approached to announce that the plane had entered its approach to the Orange County airport and to ask them to put on their seatbelts.
According to Oslett’s Rolex, it was 1:52 in the morning, but that was back in Oklahoma City. As the Lear descended, he reset his watch until it showed eight minutes to midnight.
By the time they landed, Monday had ticked into Tuesday like a bomb clock counting down toward detonation.
The advance man—who appeared to be in his late twenties, not much younger than Drew Oslett—was waiting in the lounge at the private-aircraft terminal. He told them his name was Jim Lomax, which it most likely was not.
Oslett told him that their names were Charlie Brown and Dagwood Bumstead.
The contact didn’t seem to get the joke. He helped them carry their luggage out to the parking lot, where he loaded it in the trunk of a green Oldsmobile.
Lomax was one of those Californians who had made a temple of his body and then had proceeded to more elaborate architecture. The exercise-and-health-food ethic had long ago spread into every corner of the country, and for years Americans had been striving for hard buns and healthy hearts to the farthest outposts of snowy Maine. However, the Golden State was where the first carrot-juice cocktail had been poured, where the first granola bar had been made, and was still the only place where a significant number of people believed that sticks of raw jicama were a satisfactory substitute for french fries, so only certain fanatically dedicated Californians had enough determination to exceed the structural requirements of a temple. Jim Lomax had a neck like a granite column, shoulders like limestone door lintels, a chest that could buttress a nave wall, a stomach as flat as an altar stone, and had pretty much made a great cathedral out of his body.
Although a storm front had passed through earlier in the night and the air was still damp and chilly, Lomax was wearing just jeans and a T-shirt on which was a photo of Madonna with her breasts bared (the rock singer, not the mother of God), as if the elements affected him as little as they did the quarried walls of any mighty fortress. He virtually strutted instead of walking, performing every task with calculated grace and evident self-consciousness, obviously aware and pleased that people were prone to watch and envy him.
Oslett suspected Lomax was not merely a proud man but profoundly vain, even narcissistic. The only god worshipped in the cathedral of his body was the ego that inhabited it.
Nevertheless Oslett liked the guy. The most appealing thing about Lomax was that, in his company, Karl Clocker appeared to be the smaller of the two. In fact it was the only appealing thing about the guy, but it was enough. Actually, Lomax was probably only slightly—if at all—larger than Clocker, but he was harder and better honed. By comparison, Clocker seemed slow, shambling, old, and soft. Because he was sometimes intimidated by Clocker’s size, Oslett delighted at the thought of Clocker intimidated by Lomax—though, frustratingly, if the Trekker was at all impressed, he didn’t show it.
Lomax drove. Oslett sat up front, and Clocker slumped in the back seat.
Leaving the airport, they turned right onto MacArthur Boulevard. They were in an area of expensive office towers and complexes, many of which seemed to be the regional or national headquarters of major corporations, set back from the street behind large and meticulously maintained lawns, flowerbeds, swards of shrubbery, and lots of trees, all illuminated by artfully placed landscape lighting.
“Under your seat,” Lomax told Oslett, “you’ll find a Xerox of the Mission Viejo Police report on the incident at the Stillwater house. Wasn’t easy to get hold of. Read it now, ’cause I have to take it with me and destroy it.”
Clipped to the report was a penlight by which to read it. As they followed MacArthur Boulevard south and west into Newport Beach, Oslett studied the document with growing astonishment and dismay. They reached the Pacific Coast Highway and turned south, traveling all the way through Corona Del Mar before he finished.
“This cop, this Lowbock,” Oslett said, looking up from the report, “he thinks it’s all a publicity stunt, thinks there wasn’t even an intruder.”
“That’s a break for us,” Lomax said. He grinned, which was a mistake, because it made him look like the poster boy for some charity formed to help the willfully stupid.