For more than an hour, he follows them discreetly along surface streets, north on the Santa Ana and Costa Mesa freeways, then east on the Riverside Freeway, staying well back from them. Tucked in among the heavy morning commuter traffic, his small Camry is as good as invisible.
On the Riverside Freeway, west of Corona, he imagines switching on the psychic current between himself and the false father. He pictures the rheostat and turns it five degrees out of a possible three hundred and sixty. That is sufficient for him to sense the presence of the false father ahead in traffic, although it gives him no precise fix. Six degrees, seven, eight. Eight is too much. Seven. Seven is ideal. With the switch open only seven degrees, the attraction is powerful enough to serve as a beacon to him without alerting the enemy that the link has been re-established. In the BMW, the imposter rides east toward Riverside, tense and watchful but unaware of being monitored.
Yet, in the hunter’s mind, the signal of the prey registers like a blinking red light on an electronic map.
Having mastered control of this strange adducent power, he may be able to strike at the false father with some degree of surprise.
Though the man in the BMW is expecting an attack and is on the run to avoid it, he’s also accustomed to being forewarned of assault. When enough time passes without a disturbance in the ether, when he feels no unnerving probes, he’ll regain confidence. With a return of confidence, his caution will diminish, and he’ll become vulnerable.
The hunter needs only to stay on the trail, follow the spoor, bide his time, and wait for the ideal moment to strike.
As they pass through Riverside, morning traffic thins out around them. He drops back farther, until the BMW is a distant, colorless dot that sometimes vanishes temporarily, miragelike, in a shimmer of sunlight or swirl of dust.
Onward and north. Through San Bernardino. Onto Interstate 15. Into the northern end of the San Bernardino Mountains. Through the El Cajon Pass at forty-three hundred feet.
Soon thereafter, south of the town of Hesperia, the BMW departs the interstate and heads directly north on U.S. Highway 395, into the westernmost reaches of the forbidding Mojave Desert. He follows, continuing to remain at such a distance that they can’t possibly realize the dark speck in their rearview mirror is the same car that has trailed them now through three counties.
Within a couple of miles, he passes a road sign indicating the mileage to Ridgecrest, Lone Pine, Bishop, and Mammoth Lakes. Mammoth is the farthest—two hundred and eighty-two miles.
The name of the town has an instant association for him. He has an eidetic memory. He can see the words on the dedication page of one of the mystery novels he has written and which he keeps on the shelves in his home office in Mission Viejo:
This opus is for my mother and father, Jim and Alice Stillwater, who taught me to be an honest man—and who can’t be blamed if I am able to think like a criminal.
He recalls, as well, the Rolodex card with their names and address. They live in Mammoth Lakes.
Again, he is poignantly aware of what he has lost. Even if he can reclaim his life from the imposter who wears his name, perhaps he will never regain the memories that have been stolen from him. His childhood. His adolescence. His first date. His high school experiences. He has no recollection of his mother’s or his father’s love, and it seems outrageous, monstrous, that he could be robbed of those most essential and enduringly supportive memories.
For more than sixty miles, he alternates between despair at the estrangement which is the primary quality of his existence and joy at the prospect of reclaiming his destiny.
He desperately longs to be with his father, his mother, to see their dear faces (which have been erased from the tablets of his memory), to embrace them and re-establish the profound bond between himself and the two people to whom he owes his existence. From the movies he has seen, he knows parents can be a curse—the maniacal mother who was dead before the opening scene of Psycho, the selfish mother and father who warped poor Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides—but he believes his parents to be of a finer variety, compassionate and true, like Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life.
The highway is flanked by dry lakes as white as salt, sudden battlements of red rock, wind-sculpted oceans of sand, scrub, boron flats, distant escarpments of dark stone. Everywhere lies evidence of geological upheavals and lava flows from distant millennia.
At the town of Red Mountain, the BMW leaves the highway. It stops at a service station to refuel.
He follows until he is certain of their intention, but passes the service station without stopping. They have guns. He does not. A better moment will be found to kill the impersonator.
Re-entering Highway 395, he drives north a short distance to Johannesburg, which sits west of the Lava Mountains. He exits again and tanks up the Camry at another service station. He buys crackers, candy bars, and peanuts from the vending machines to sustain him during the long drive ahead.
Perhaps because Charlotte and Emily had to use the restrooms back at the Red Mountain stop, he is on the highway ahead of the BMW, but that doesn’t matter because he no longer needs to follow them. He knows where they are going.
Mammoth Lakes, California.
Jim and Alice Stillwater. Who taught him to be an honest man. Who can’t be blamed if he is able to think like a criminal. To whom he dedicated a novel. Beloved. Cherished. Stolen from him but soon to be reclaimed.
He is eager to enlist them in his crusade to regain his family and his destiny. Perhaps the false father can deceive his children, and perhaps even Paige can be fooled into accepting the imposter as the real Martin Stillwater. But his parents will recognize their true son, blood of their blood, and will not be misled by the cunning mimicry of that family-stealing fraud.
Since turning onto Highway 395, where traffic is light, the BMW had maintained a steady sixty to sixty-five miles an hour, though the road made greater speed possible in many areas. Now, he pushes the Camry north at seventy-five and eighty. He should be able to reach Mammoth Lakes between two o’clock and two-fifteen, half an hour to forty-five minutes ahead of the imposter, which will give him time to alert his mother and father to the evil intentions of the creature that masquerades as their son.
The highway angles northwest across Indian Wells Valley, with the El Paso Mountains to the south. Mile by mile, his heart swells with emotion at the prospect of being reunited with his mom and dad, from whom he has been cruelly separated. He aches with the need to embrace them and bask in their love, their unquestioning love, their undying and perfect love.
8
The Bell JetRanger executive helicopter that conveyed Oslett and Clocker to Mammoth Lakes belonged to a motion-picture studio that was a Network affiliate. With black calfskin seats, brass fixtures, and cabin walls plushly upholstered in emerald-green lizard skin, the ambiance was even more luxurious than in the passenger compartment of the Lear. The chopper also offered a more entertaining collection of reading matter than had been available in the jet, including that day’s editions of The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety plus the most recent issues of Premiere, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Forbes, Fortune, GQ, Spy, The Ecological Watch Society Journal, and Bon Appétit.
To occupy his time during the flight, Clocker produced another Star Trek novel, which he had purchased in the gift shop at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel before they checked out. Oslett was convinced that the spread of such fantastical literature into the tastefully appointed and elegantly managed shops of a five-star resort—formerly the kind of place that catered to the cultured and powerful, not merely the rich—was as alarming a sign of society’s imminent collapse as could be found, on a par with heavily armed crack-cocaine dealers selling their wares in schoolyards.