Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dark Rivers Of The Heart(Lit)

  "At least it's suspension with pay," Jessica said.

  "They have to keep paying me or get in trouble with the union," Harris explained. "It's no gift."

  Darius brewed a pot of coffee, and while Jessica continued with her pie-making, he and Harris remained in the kitchen, so the three of them could discuss legal options and strategies. Although the situation was grim, it felt good to be talking about taking action, striking back.

  But the hits just kept on coming.

  Not even half an hour passed before Carl Falkenberg called to inform Harris that the Internal Revenue Service had served the LAPD with a legal order to garnishee his wages against "possible unpaid taxes from trafficking in illegal drugs." Although his suspension was with pay, his weekly salary would have to be held in trust until the issue of his guilt or innocence was determined in court.

  Walking back to the table and sitting opposite his brother again, Harris told them the latest. His voice was now as flat and emotionless as that of a talking machine.

  Darius exploded off his chair, furious. "Damn it, this is not right, this does not wash, no way, I'll be damned if it does! Nobody has proved anything. We'll get this garnishment withdrawn. We'll start on it right now. It might take a few days, but we'll make them eat that piece of paper, Harris, I swear to you that we'll make the bastards eat it." He hurried out of the kitchen, evidently to his study and the telephone there.

  For a long spiral of seconds, Harris and Jessica stared at each other. Neither of them spoke. They had been married so long that sometimes they didn't have to speak to know what they would have said to each other.

  She returned her attention to the dough in the pie pan, which she had been crimping along the edge with her thumb and forefinger. Ever since Harris had come home, Jessica's hands had been trembling noticeably. Now the tremors were gone. Her hands were steady. He had the terrible feeling that her steadiness was the result of a bleak resignation to the unbeatable superiority of the unknown forces arrayed against them.

  He looked out the window beside the table. Sunshine streamed through ficus branches. The flowers in the beds of English primrose were almost Day-Glo bright. The backyard was expansive, well and lushly landscaped, with a swimming pool in the center of a used-brick patio. To every dreamer living in deprivation, that backyard was a perfect symbol of success. A highly motivating image. But Harris Descoteaux knew what it really was. Just another room in the prison.

  * * *

  While the JetRanger flew due north, Ellie sat in one of the two seats in the last row of the passenger cabin. She held the open attaché case on her lap and worked with the computer that was built into it.

  She was still marveling over her good fortune. When she had first boarded the chopper and had searched the cabin to be sure no agency men were hiding there, before they had even taken off, she had discovered the computer on the deck at the end of the aisle. She recognized it immediately as hardware developed for the agency, because she'd actually looked over Danny's shoulder when he had been designing some of the critical software for it. She realized that it was plugged in and on-line, but she was too busy to check it out closely until after they got off the ground and disabled the second JetRanger. Safely in the air, northbound toward Salt Lake City, she returned to the computer and was astonished when she realized that the image on the display screen was the satellite look-down of the very shopping center from which they had just escaped. If the agency had temporarily hijacked Earthguard 3 from the EPA to search for her and Spencer, they could only have done so through their omnipotent home-office computer system in Virginia. Mama. Only Mama had such power. The workstation that had been abandoned in the chopper was on-line with Mama, the megabitch herself.

  If she had found the computer unplugged, she wouldn't have been able to get into Mama. A thumbprint was required to get on-line. Danny hadn't designed the software, but he had seen a demonstration of it and had told her about it, as excited as a child who had been shown one of the best toys ever. Because her thumbprint was not one of the approved, the hardware would have been useless to her.

  Spencer came back down the aisle, with Rocky padding along behind him, and Ellie glanced up from the VDT in surprise. "Shouldn't you be keeping a gun on the crew?"

  "I took their headsets away from them, so they can't use the radio. They don't have any weapons up there, and even if they had an arsenal, they might not use it. They're flyboys, not murderous thugs. But they think we are murderous thugs, insane murderous thugs, and they're nicely respectful."

  "Yeah, well, they also know we need them to fly this crate."

  As Ellie returned to her work on the computer, Spencer picked up the cellular phone that someone had abandoned on the last seat in the port-side row. He sat across the aisle from her.

  "Well, see," he said, "they think I can fly this eggbeater if anything happens to them."

  "Can you?" she asked, without shifting her attention from the video display, keeping her fingers busy on the keys.

  "No. But when I was a Ranger, I learned a lot about choppers—mostly related to how you sabotage them, boobytrap them, and blow them up. I recognize all the flight instruments, know the names of them. I was real convincing. Fact is, they probably think the only reason I haven't already killed them is because I don't want to have to haul their bodies out of the cockpit and sit in their blood."

  "What if they lock the cockpit door?"

  "I broke the lock. And they don't have anything in there to wedge the door shut with."

  She said, "You're pretty good at this."

  "Aw, shucks, not really. What've you got there?"

  While Ellie worked, she told him about their good fortune.

  "Everything's coming up roses," he said with only a half-note of sarcasm. "What're you doing?"

  "Through Mama, I've up-linked to Earthguard, the EPA satellite they've been using to track us. I've gotten into the core of its operating program. All the way to the program-management level."

  He whistled in appreciation. "Look, even Mr. Rocky Dog is impressed."

  She glanced up and saw that Rocky was grinning. His tail swished back and forth on the deck, thumping into the seats on both sides of the aisle.

  "You're going to screw up a hundred-million-dollar satellite, turn it into space junk?" Spencer asked.

  "Only for a while. Freeze it up for six hours. By then they won't have a clue where to look for us."

  "Ah, go ahead, have fun, screw it up permanently."

  "When the agency isn't using it for crap like this, it might actually do some beneficial work."

  "So you're a civic-minded individual after all."

  "Well, I was a Girl Scout once. It gets in your blood, like a disease."

  "Then you probably wouldn't want to go out with me tonight, spraypaint some graffiti on highway overpasses."

  "There!" she said, and tapped the ENTER key. She studied the data that came up on the screen and smiled. "Earthguard just shut down for a six-hour nap. They've lost us—except for radar tracking. Are you sure we're keeping due north and high enough for radar to pick us up, like I asked?"

  "The boys up front promised me."

  "Perfect."

  "What did you do before all this?" he asked.

  "Freelance software designer, specializing in video games."

  "You created video games?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, of course, you did."

  "I'm serious. I did."

  "No, you missed my inflection," he said. "I meant, of course you did. It's obvious. And now you're in a real-life video game."

  "The way the world's going, everyone'll be living in one big video game eventually, and it's sure as hell not going to be a nice one, not 'Super Mario Brothers' or anything that gentle. More like 'Mortal Kombat.' "

  "Now that you've disabled a hundred-million-dollar satellite, what next?"

  As they had talked, Ellie had been focused on the VDT. She had retreated from Earthguard, back into Mama. She
was calling up menus, one after the other, speed-reading them. "I'm looking around, seeing what's the best damage I can do."

  "Mind doing something for me first?"

  'Tell me what, while I nose around here."

  He told her about the trap that he had set for anyone who might break into his cabin while he was gone.

  It was her turn to whistle appreciatively. "God, I'd like to've seen their faces when they figured out what was going down. And what happened to the digitized photographs when they left Malibu?"

  "They were transmitted to the Pacific Bell central computer, preceded by a code that activated a program I'd previously designed and secretly buried there. That program allowed them to be received and then retransmitted to the Illinois Bell central computer, where I buried another little hidden program that came to life in response, to the special access code, and it received them from Pacific Bell."

  "You think the agency didn't track them that far?"

  "Well, to Pacific Bell, sure. But after my little program sent them to Chicago, it erased all record of that call. Then it self-destructed."

  "Sometimes a self-destruct can be rebuilt and examined. Then they'd see the instructions about erasing the call to Illinois Bell."

  "Not in this case. This was a beautiful little self-destructed program that stayed beautifully self-destructed, I guarantee you. When it dismantled itself, it also took out a reasonably large block of the Pacific Bell system."

  Ellie interrupted her urgent search of Mama's programs to look at him. "How large is reasonably large?"

  "About thirty thousand people must've been without telephone service for two to three hours before they got backup systems on-line."

  "You were never a Girl Scout," she said.

  "Well, I was never given a chance."

  "You learned a lot in that computer-crime task force."

  "I was a diligent employee," he admitted.

  "More than you learned about helicopters, for sure. So you think those photos are still waiting in the Chicago Bell computer?"

  "I'll walk you through the routine, and we'll find out. Might be useful to get a good look at the faces of some of these thugs—for future reference. Don't you think?"

  "I think. Tell me what to do."

  Three minutes later, the first of the photographs appeared on the video display of the computer in her lap. Spencer leaned across the narrow aisle from his seat, and she angled the attaché case so they both could see the screen.

  "That's my living room," he said.

  "You're not deeply interested in decor, are you?"

  "My favorite period style is Early Neat."

  "More like Late Monastery."

  Two men in riot gear were moving through the room quickly enough to be blurred in the still shot.

  "Hit the space bar," Spencer said.

  She hit the bar, and the next photograph appeared on the screen. They went through the first ten shots in less than a minute. A few provided a clear image of a face or two. But it was difficult to get a sense of what a man looked like when he was wearing a riot helmet with a chin strap.

  "Just shuffle through them until we see something new," he said.

  Ellie rapidly, repeatedly tapped the space bar, flipping through the photos, until they came to shot number thirty-one. A new man appeared, and he was not in riot gear.

  "Sonofabitch," Spencer said.

  "I think so," she agreed.

  "Let's see thirty-two."

  She tapped the space bar.

  "Well."

  "Yeah."

  "Thirty-three."

  Tap.

  "No doubt about it," she said.

  Tap. Thirty-four.

  Tap. Thirty-five.

  Tap. Thirty-six.

  The same man was in shot after shot, moving around the living room of the cabin in Malibu. And he was the last of the five men they had seen getting out of this very helicopter in front of the Hallmark card store a short while ago.

  "Weirdest thing of all," Ellie said, "I'll bet we're looking at his picture on his computer."

  "You're probably sitting in his seat."

  "In his helicopter."

  Spencer said, "My God, he must be pissed."

  Quickly they went through the rest of the photographs. That pudgy-faced, rather jolly-looking fellow was in every shot until he apparently spit on a piece of paper and pasted it to the camera lens.

  "I won't forget what he looks like," Spencer said, "but I wish we had a printer, could get a copy of that."

  "There's a printer built in," she said, indicating a slot on the side of the attache case. "I think there's a supply of maybe fifty sheets of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven bond paper. I sort of remember that's what Danny told me about it."

  "All I need is one."

  "Two. One for me."

  They picked the clearest shot of their benign-looking enemy, and Ellie printed out twice.

  "You've never seen him before, huh?" Spencer asked.

  "Never."

  "Well, I suspect we'll be seeing him again."

  Ellie closed out Illinois Bell and returned to Mama's seemingly endless series of menus. The depth and breadth of the megabitch's abilities really did make her seem omnipotent and omniscient.

  Settling back into his seat, Spencer said, "Think you can give Mama a terminal stroke?"

  She shook her head. "No. Too many redundancies built into her for that."

  "A bloody nose, then?"

  "At least that much."

  She was aware of him staring at her for the better part of a minute, while she worked.

  Finally he said, "Have you broken many?"

  "Noses? Me?"

  "Hearts."

  She was amazed to feel a blush rising in her cheeks. "Not me."

  "You could. Easy."

  She said nothing.

  "The dog's listening," he said.

  "What?"

  "I can only speak the truth."

  "I'm no cover girl."

  "I love the way you look."

  "I'd like a better nose."

  "I'll buy you a different one if you want."

  "I'll think about it."

  "But it's only going to be different. Not any better."

  "You're a strange man."

  "Besides, I wasn't talking about looks."

  She didn't respond, just kept poring through Mama.

  He said, "If I was blind, if I'd never seen your face, I already know you well enough that you could still break my heart."

  When she was finally able to take a breath, she said, "As soon as they give up on Earthguard, they'll try to get control of another satellite and find us again. So it's time to drop below radar and change course. Better tell the flyboys."

  After a hesitation, which might have indicated disappointment in her failure to respond in any expected fashion to the way he had bared his feelings, he said, "Where are we going?'

  "As near the Colorado border as this bucket will take us."

  "I'll find out how much fuel we have. But why Colorado?"

  "Because Denver is the nearest really major city. And if we can get to a major city, I can make contact with people who can help us."

  "Do we need help?"

  "Haven't you been paying attention?"

  "I've got a history with Colorado," he said, and an uneasiness marked his voice.

  "I'm aware of that."

  "Quite a history."

  "Does it matter?"

  "Maybe," he said, and he was no longer romancing her. "I guess it shouldn't. It's just a place. . . ."

  She met his eyes. 'The heat's on us too high right now. We need to get to some people who can hide us out, let things cool off."

  "You know people like that?"

  "Not until recently. I've always been on my own before. But lately . . . things have changed."

  "Who are they?"

  "Good people. That's all you need to know for now."

  "Then I guess we're going to Denver," he said
.

  * * *

  Mormons, Mormons were everywhere, a plague of Mormons, Mormons in neatly pressed uniforms, clean-shaven, clear-eyed, too soft-spoken for cops, so excessively polite that Roy Miro wondered if it was all an act, Mormons to the left of him, Mormons to the right of him, both local and county authorities, and all of them too efficient and by-the-book either to flub their investigation or to let this whole mess be covered over with a wink and a slap on the back. What bothered Roy the most about these particular Mormons was that they robbed him of his usual advantage, because in their company, his affable manner was nothing unusual. His politeness paled in comparison to theirs. His quick and easy smile was only one in a blizzard of smiles full of teeth remarkably whiter than his own. They swarmed through the shopping center and the supermarket, these Mormons, asking their oh-so-polite questions, armed with their small notebooks and Bic pens and direct Mormon stares, and Roy could never be sure that they were buying any part of his cover story or that they were convinced by his impeccable phony credentials.

  Hard as he tried, he couldn't figure out how to schmooze with Mormon cops. He wondered if they would respond well and open up to him if he told them how very much he liked their tabernacle choir. He didn't actually like or dislike their choir, however, and he had a feeling that they would know he was lying just to warm them up. The same was true of the Osmonds, the premier Mormon show-business family. He neither liked nor disliked their singing and dancing; they were undeniably talented, but they just weren't to his taste. Marie Osmond had perfect legs, legs that he could have spent hours kissing and stroking, legs against which he wished that he could crush handfuls of soft red roses—but he was pretty sure that these Mormons were not the type of cops who would enthusiastically join in on a conversation about that sort of thing.

  He was certain that not all of the cops were Mormons. The equal-opportunity laws ensured a diverse police force. If he could find those who weren't Mormons, he might be able to establish the degree of rapport necessary to grease the wheels of their investigation, one way or another, and get the hell out of there. But the non-Mormons were indistinguishable from the Mormons because they'd adopted Mormon ways, manners, and mannerisms. The non-Mormons—whoever the cunning bastards might be—were all polite, pressed, well groomed, sober, with infuriatingly well-scrubbed teeth that were free of all telltale nicotine stains. One of the officers was a black man named Hargrave, and Roy was positive that he'd found at least one cop to whom the teachings of Brig-ham Young were no more important than those of Kali, the malevolent form of the Hindu Mother Goddess, but Hargrave turned out to be perhaps the most Mormon of all Mormons who had ever walked the Mormon Way. Hargrave had a walletful of pictures of his wife and nine children, including two sons who were currently on religious missions in squalid corners of Brazil and Tonga.