Though both the assistant manager and the teller were smiling and polite, Marty was aware of their curiosity and concern. They were in the money business, after all, and they knew there weren’t many legitimate—and fewer sensible—reasons for anyone to carry seventy thousand in cash.
Even if he had felt comfortable leaving Paige and the kids in the car, Marty would not have done so. The first suspicion to cross a banker’s mind would be that the cash was needed to meet a ransom payment, and prudence would require a call to the police. With the entire family present, kidnapping could be ruled out.
Marty’s teller began to consult with other tellers, tabulating the number of hundreds contained in all their drawers, while Mrs. Higgens disappeared through the open door of the vault at the back of the cage.
He glanced at Paige and the girls. East entrance. South. His watch. Smiling, smiling all the while, smiling like an idiot.
We’ll be out of here in fifteen minutes, he told himself. Maybe as few as ten. Out of here and on our way and safe.
The dark wave hit him.
At a Denny’s, he uses the men’s room, then selects a booth by the windows and orders an enormous breakfast.
His waitress is a cute brunette named Gayle. She makes jokes about his appetite. She is coming on to him. He considers trying to make a date with her. She has a lovely body, slender legs.
Having sex with Gayle would be adultery because he is married to Paige. He wonders if it would still be adultery if, after having sex with Gayle, he killed her.
He leaves her a good tip and decides to return within a week or two and ask her for a date. She has a pert nose, sensuous lips.
In the Camry again, before he starts the engine, he closes his eyes, clears his mind, and imagines he is magnetized, likewise the false father, opposite poles toward each other. He seeks attraction.
This time he is pulled into the orbit of the other man quicker than he was when he tried to make a connection in the middle of the night, and the adducent power is immeasurably greater than before. Indeed, the pull is so strong, so instant, he grunts in surprise and locks his hands around the steering wheel, as if he is in real danger of being yanked out of the Toyota through the windshield and shooting like a bullet straight to the heart of the false father.
His enemy is immediately aware of the contact. The man is frightened, threatened.
East.
And south.
That will lead him back in the general direction of Mission Viejo, though he doubts the imposter feels safe enough to have returned home already.
A pressure wave, as from an enormous explosion, smashed into Marty and nearly rocked him off his feet. With both hands he clutched the countertop in front of the teller’s window to keep his balance. He leaned into the counter, bracing himself against it.
The sensation was entirely subjective. The air seemed compressed to the point of liquefaction, but nothing disintegrated, cracked, or fell over. He appeared to be the only person affected.
After the initial shock of the wave, Marty felt as if he’d been buried under an avalanche. Weighed down by immeasurable megatons of snow. Breathless. Paralyzed. Cold.
He suspected that his face had turned pale, waxy. He knew for certain that he would be unable to speak if spoken to. Were anyone to return to the teller’s window while the seizure gripped him, the fear beneath his casual pose would be revealed. He would be exposed as a man in desperate trouble, and they would be reluctant to hand so much cash to someone who was so clearly either ill or deranged.
He grew dramatically colder when he experienced a mental caress from the same malignant, ghostly presence that he’d sensed yesterday in the garage as he’d been trying to leave for the doctor’s office. The icy “hand” of the spirit pressed against the raw surface of his brain, as if reading his location by fingering data that was Brailled into the convoluted tissues of his cerebral cortex. He now understood that the spirit was actually the look-alike, whose uncanny powers were not limited to spontaneous recovery from mortal chest wounds.
He breaks the magnetic connection.
He drives out of the restaurant parking lot.
He turns on the radio. Michael Bolton is singing about love.
The song is touching. He is deeply moved by it, almost to tears. Now that he finally is somebody, now that a wife waits for him and two young children need his guidance, he knows the meaning and value of love. He wonders how he could have lived this long without it.
He heads south. And east.
Destiny calls.
Abruptly, the spectral hand lifted from Marty.
The crushing pressure was released, and the world snapped back to normal—if there was such a thing as normality any more.
He was relieved that the attack had lasted only five or ten seconds. None of the bank employees had been aware anything was wrong with him.
However, the need to obtain the cash and get out of there was urgent. He looked at Paige and the kids in the open lounge at the far end of the room. He shifted his gaze worriedly to the east entrance, the south entrance, east again.
The Other knew where they were. In minutes, at most, their mysterious and implacable enemy would be upon them.
4
The scrambled eggs on Oslett’s abandoned plate acquired a faint grayish cast as they cooled and congealed. The salty aroma of bacon, previously so appealing, induced in him a vague nausea.
Stunned by the consideration that Alfie might have developed into a creature with sexual urges and with the ability to satisfy them, Oslett was nonetheless determined not to appear concerned, at least not in front of Peter Waxhill. “Well, all of this still amounts to nothing but conjecture.”
“Yes,” said Waxhill, “but we’re checking the past to see if the theory holds water.”
“What past?”
“Police records in every city where Alfie has been on assignment in the past fourteen months. Rapes and rape-murders during the hours he wasn’t actually working.”
Oslett’s mouth was dry. His heart was thudding.
He didn’t care what happened to the Stillwater family. Hell, they were only Klingons.
He didn’t care, either, if the Network collapsed and all of its grand ambitions went unfulfilled. Eventually an organization similar to it would be formed, and the dream would be renewed.
But if their bad boy proved impossible to recapture or stop, the potential was here for a stain to spread deep into the Oslett family, jeopardizing its wealth and seriously diminishing its political power for decades to come. Above all, Drew Oslett demanded respect. The ultimate guarantor of respect had always been family, bloodline. The prospect of the Oslett name becoming an object of ridicule and scorn, target of public outrage, brunt of every TV comedian’s puerile jokes, and the subject of embarrassing stories in papers as diverse as the New York Times and the National Enquirer was soul-shaking.
“Didn’t you ever wonder,” Waxhill asked, “what your boy did with his free time, between assignments?”
“We monitored him closely, of course, for the first six weeks. He went to movies, restaurants, parks, watched television, did all the things that people do to kill time—just as we wanted him to act outside a controlled environment. Nothing strange. Nothing at all out of the ordinary. Certainly nothing to do with women.”
“He would have been on his best behavior, naturally, if he was aware that he was being watched.”
“He wasn’t aware. Couldn’t be. He never made our surveillance men. No way. They’re the best.” Oslett realized he was protesting too much. Nevertheless, he couldn’t keep from adding, “No way.”