Nothing in the scene was threatening or unusual, yet it seemed ominous to him. He felt that he was looking out at a world that was no longer familiar, a world changed for the worse. The differences were indefinable, subjective rather than objective, perceptible to the spirit more than to the senses but nonetheless real. And the pace of that dark change was accelerating. Soon the view from this room or any other would be, to him, like something seen through the porthole of a spacecraft on a far alien planet which superficially resembled his own world but which was, below its deceptive surface, infinitely strange and inimical to human life.
“I don’t think,” he said, “that the police would ordinarily have completed their tests on those blood samples so quickly, and I know it’s not standard practice to release crime-lab results so casually to the media.” He let the draperies fall into place and turned to Paige, whose brow was furrowed with worry. “National news? Live, on the scene? I don’t know what the hell is happening, Paige, but it’s even stranger than I thought it was last night.”
While Paige showered, Marty pulled up a chair in front of the television and channel-hopped, searching for other news programs. He caught the end of a second story about himself on a local channel—and then a third piece, complete, on a national show.
He was trying to guard against paranoia, but he had the distinct impression that both stories suggested, without making accusations, that the falsity of his statement to the Mission Viejo Police was a foregone conclusion and that his real motive was either to sell more books or something darker and weirder than mere career-pumping. Both programs made use of the photograph from the current issue of People, in which he resembled a movie zombie with glowing eyes, lurching out of shadows, violent and demented. And both pointedly mentioned the three guns of which he’d been relieved by the police, as if he might be a suburban survivalist living atop a bunker packed solid with arms and ammunition. Toward the end of the third report, he thought an implication was made to the effect that he might even be dangerous, although it was so smooth and so subtly inserted that it was more a matter of the reporter’s tone of voice and expressions than any words in the script.
Rattled, he switched off the television.
For a while he stared at the blank screen. The gray of the dead monitor matched his mood.
After everyone was showered and dressed, the girls got in the back seat of the BMW and dutifully put on their seatbelts while their parents stowed the luggage in the trunk.
When Marty slammed the trunk lid and locked it, Paige spoke to him quietly, so Charlotte and Emily couldn’t hear. “You really think we have to go this far, do these things, it’s really that bad?”
“I don’t know. Like I told you, I’ve been brooding about this ever since I woke up, since three o’clock this morning, and I still don’t know if I’m over-reacting.”
“These are serious steps to take, even risky.”
“It’s just that . . . as strange as this already is, with The Other and everything he said to me, whatever underlies it all is stranger still. More dangerous than one lunatic with a gun. Deadlier and a lot bigger than that. Something so big it’ll crush us if we try to stand up to it. That’s how I felt in the middle of the night, afraid, more scared even than when he had the kids in his car. And after what I saw on TV this morning, I’m more—not less—inclined to go with my gut feelings.”
He realized that his expression of dread was extreme, with an unmistakable flavor of paranoia. But he was no alarmist, and he was confident that his instincts could be trusted. Events had dissolved all of his doubts about his mental well-being.
He wished he could identify an enemy other than the improbable dead-ringer, for he knew intuitively that there was another enemy, and it would be comforting to have it defined. The Mafia, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, consortiums of evil bankers, the board of directors of some ferociously greedy international conglomerate, right-wing generals intent on establishing a military dictatorship, a cabal of insane Mideastern zealots, mad scientists intent on blowing the world to smithereens for the sheer hell of it, or Satan himself in all his horned splendor—any of the standard villains of television dramas and countless novels, regardless of how unlikely and clichéd, would be preferable to an adversary without face or form or name.
Chewing her lower lip, lost in thought, Paige let her gaze travel across the breeze-ruffled trees, other parked cars, and the front of the motel, before tilting her head back and looking up at three shrieking sea gulls that wheeled across the mostly blue and uncaring azure sky.
“You sense it too,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Oppressive. We’re not being watched, but the feeling is almost the same.”
“More than that,” she said. “Different. The world has changed—or the way I look at it.”
“Me too.”
“Something’s been . . . lost.”
And we’ll never find it again, he thought.
2
The Ritz-Carlton was a remarkable hotel, exquisitely tasteful, with generous applications of marble, limestone, granite, quality art, and antiques throughout its public areas. The enormous flower arrangements, on display wherever one turned, were the most artfully fashioned that Oslett had ever seen. Attired in subdued uniforms, courteous, omnipresent, the staff seemed to outnumber the guests. All in all, it reminded Oslett of home, the Connecticut estate on which he had been raised, although the family mansion was larger than the Ritz-Carlton, was furnished with antiques only of museum quality, had a staff-to-family ratio of six to one, and featured a landing pad large enough to accommodate the military helicopters in which the President of the United States and his retinue sometimes traveled.
The two-bedroom suite with spacious living room, in which Drew Oslett and Clocker were quartered, offered every amenity from a fully stocked bar to marble shower stalls so spacious that it would have been possible for a visiting ballet dancer to practice entrechats during his morning ablutions. The towels were not by Pratesi, as were those he had used all his life, but they were good Egyptian cotton, soft and absorbent.
By 7:50 Tuesday morning, Oslett had dressed in a white cotton shirt with whalebone buttons by Theophilus Shirtmakers of London, a navy-blue cashmere blazer crafted with sublime attention to detail by his personal tailor in Rome, gray wool slacks, black oxfords (an eccentric touch) handmade by an Italian cobbler living in Paris, and a club tie in stripes of navy, maroon, and gold. The color of his silk pocket handkerchief precisely matched the gold in his tie.
Thus attired, his mood elevated by his sartorial perfection, he went looking for Clocker. He didn’t desire the big man’s company, of course; he just preferred, for his own peace of mind, to know what Clocker was up to at all times. And he nurtured the hope that one blessed day he would discover Karl Clocker dead, felled by a massive cardiac infarction, cerebral hemorrhage, or an alien death ray like those about which the big man was always reading.
Clocker was in a patio chair on the balcony off the living room, ignoring a breathtaking view of the Pacific, his nose stuck in the last chapter of Shape-Changing Gynecologists of the Dark Galaxy, or whatever the hell it was called. He was wearing the same hat with the duck feather, tweed sportcoat, and Hush Puppies, although he had on new purple socks, fresh slacks, and a clean white shirt. He’d changed into a different harlequin-pattern sweater-vest, as well, this one in blue, pink, yellow, and gray. Though he was not sporting a tie, so much black hair bristled from the open neck of his shirt that, at a glance, he appeared to be wearing a cravat.