The Puppet Master

by John Dalmas

  PART THREE:

  CLIMAX AND

  COMPLETION

  PROLOG

  Her crepe-soled nurse's shoes stepped quietly on the closely fitted flagstones. It was past time for her employer's breakfast, but sometimes he'd lose himself in contemplation or a book, neglecting to come in at nine o'clock to eat. And if he was meditating, it would be worth her job to disturb him. She didn't expect to find anything wrong, despite his generally poor health. He'd simply been preoccupied lately.

  When she saw him on the ground, half out of the arbor, she hurried to him, knelt in brief examination, then as fast as her overweight, middle-aged body would take her, ran back to the house to get help.

  * * *

  The physician left the room thoughtfully. He'd done what he could, and considered the prognosis favorable. Next time—who knew? He'd once wanted a brain scan done on his patient, but the man had refused, absolutely, and it seemed now there'd been no tumor, for that had been years earlier. Beyond that, he had no explanation for the seizures. Possibly someone else might, but his patient had expressly forbidden him to bring in consultants.

  He had no illusions that he was medically up to date. As up to date as many, no doubt, but . . . Not much of his reading was professional these days. Hadn't been for years.

  His patient's reclusiveness went beyond a simple preference for privacy. It seemed to reflect some pathological condition, although he was brilliant beyond a doubt.

  Being a house physician for a sometimes crochety recluse was not what he'd visualized as a student, many years earlier. He hadn't known himself well then, hadn't foreseen his susceptibility to alcohol, and eventually cocaine. Or how he would ruin his marriages—one, two, and three—and allow, even cultivate the decay of his practice.

  Then his patient-to-be had found him. No doubt through agents. He was aware, vaguely, that the man had people elsewhere who served him, though as far as he knew, they never came in person. The man, whose health had already been poor, had sat down with him as a friend, not a patient. Had charmed him, impressed him with his knowledge—its breadth, its depth—and his insights into many things. And in a short series of ever-stranger visits and gentle questionings, had given him to see things he'd never imagined. Until he became aware that he no longer wanted to snort white powder or drink amber whiskey.

  Only then had his friend asked him to be his private physician. At a salary ridiculously low for a doctor, but impossible to refuse. He wasn't young himself, though less old than he looked, and his "future" was past. And after all, the man had saved him, from himself and his addictions. With a signed contract in hand, he'd saved him from his creditors as well, by a remarkable display of bargaining. He'd paid them off in cash, thirty to sixty cents on the dollar!

  Besides, the man had a remarkable library, and the doctor had one addiction left—books. Between the two of them, they read enough for fifty ordinary people.

  But they rarely talked anymore as friends. They seldom had, once their agreement was signed.

  * * *

  Looking back a few days later, the old man considered himself lucky to have come through alive. He'd been unconscious for more than twenty hours. The mind he'd been in was one he'd felt secure with, one he'd come to control more completely than any he'd associated with before. But to be in it at the moment of violent death . . .

  Never had anyone interfered so utterly with him before. Never. Not Christman, not anyone. Christman had cost him more, far more. But in terms of personal interference . . .

  And to develop one's powers, one must uphold one's integrity.

  Christman he'd killed personally, so to speak. He'd been there, willed the trigger pulled, seen the dismay on Christman's face. He'd be more circumspect in handling this man—use a throwaway resource, some potent underworld group, set it in motion and allow it to operate. And if it failed, use another. There was no hurry. And he needed to husband his physical strength, the health that remained to him. While he developed his powers further, sufficiently to renovate the difficult husk he occupied, rejuvenate it.

  He chuckled. He would rejuvenate it; he was confident of that now. He'd made major progress recently in his ability to psychically tinker bodies. He could even kill now without an intermediary, if the person's consciousness was sufficiently weakened. He'd tested that, first with comatose, then semi-comatose bodies. It involved manipulating certain gross physiological functions. To rejuvenate a body, of course, would require more subtle, intricate, and knowledgeable manipulations. He'd hypnotize his physician and question him, have him help design a program. Presumably it would take time, and no doubt numerous steps. But he'd always been patient, he told himself. Almost always.

  36

  GRAND CANYON;

  THE BARNEY TRAIL

  October 2012

  It was Indian summer in Flagstaff, Arizona. With Tuuli beside him, Martti Seppanen turned their rented Ford travel van north on US 180, here called Humphrey Street. In less than a minute they were out of the downtown business district, driving through a pleasant residential area.

  This was the Coconino Plateau, which at 2,100 meters and higher was a land of coniferous forests. To their left, intermittently visible between shade trees, was the low, pine-clad mesa called Mars Hill, with its observatory domes and comblike arrays of antennae. Northward, the street led the eye to a pyramidal mountain peak that loomed bare-topped above forested slopes. To Martti, Tuuli seemed energized with an expectation he didn't really understand. "Those peaks," she said, "are the eroded rim of an ancient volcano. Did you know that?"

  "Nope. No I didn't."

  "It's supposed to have been twenty thousand feet tall before the top blew off, a very long time ago. Can you imagine? And this is what's left. Humphrey Peak is the highest part of the rim, 12,680 feet. An Indian spirit lives in it. I've met him."

  Martti said nothing. Nothing came to him.

  "You can't see Humphrey from here," she went on. "Agassiz and Fremont are in the way, with the ancient crater in between. Twenty thousand years ago it held a glacier. Now it holds patches of aspen, and great heaps of rock."

  He'd seldom seen her so talkative. She paused, then began to recite:

  Primal mountain bursting long ago,

  rupturing the darkness with your might,

  shrouded with clouds of ash and fumes

  that glowed and flashed and shuddered

  in the night,

  high shoulders flowing red with molten rock,

  with heat and sullen light.

  Is that you?

  Is that you

  so calm and clean beneath the sky,

  slopes serene in snow

  and forest frosted white?

  Ah, I know you in many moods,

  green, with branches dripping rain,

  yellow with aspen

  or blind with blizzard.

  I know you now.

  She looked at her husband expectantly. "Nice," he said. It seemed to him he should say more, but didn't know what. After a moment he asked, "Who wrote it?"

  "I don't know. Frank recited it when he and Mikki hiked me up the mountain to meet the Indian spirit. He wrote it down for me when we got back to Long Valley."

  Indian spirit. Was there really such a thing up there? He supposed there was, if Tuuli said so. And if there was, she'd probably have felt it; maybe communed with it. The old-time Lapps, it seemed to him, had missed a bet in having had only male shamans. He wondered if he could ever sense a spirit, then remembered the visitor he'd felt in front of Molly Cadigan's that day, and wondered if it qualified.

  While they'd talked, they'd left the town behind, for what a sign told them was the Coconino National Forest. For some miles its pines alternately crowded the highway and stood back behind meadows of tall grass that formed vistas, provided scope. Here and there was private land, subdivided and built upon, but mostly it was forest. There was no hint of cloud, but autumn haze softened every view. Then the highway climbed a long tapering
skirt of the mountain, to top out on a higher level of the plateau. Here for a few miles the land was an old lava flow, its forest thin and scrubby, its black and rugged bedrock showing often through short bunchgrass.

  From this, the highway emerged into a long meadow that gave them another vista. Martti pulled off at a tiny roadside chapel, a rustic, cross-topped A-frame. Here there was soil again, and the grass stood tall, cured pale yellow by late summer's freezing nights.

  Tuuli was out of the van ahead of him, beaming at what she saw. They'd driven half around the mountain, and looked southward now at its north side. A band of yellow aspen clothed its lower slopes, and nearer, bordering the meadow, tall stands of it glowed red-gold in the late sun. Above the aspen zone was a forest of dark spruce, and above timberline a thin covering of snow bequeathed by an early October storm. Tuuli's hand found Martti's, and she stood close, leaning against his arm, her head against his shoulder.

  It seemed to him he should say something, then she said it for him: "It's beautiful."

  "Yeah," he said, "it sure is." They stood a minute longer, then got back in the van and drove on. They'd traveled little in their year of marriage. Actually they'd been married on a trip, but it hadn't been a vacation in the usual sense. After he'd solved the case of the twice-killed astronomer, Joe had given him administrative leave and sent him out of town to avoid the cameras. The case itself hadn't drawn nearly the attention the Christman case had, but Martti had drawn a lot. In that earlier instance, the detective had become the focus of attention. In the Christman case, the case itself, with its sensational elements, had become the focus, with the media only secondarily interested in the detective.

  At any rate, it was their first vacation trip since their honeymoon, with the Grand Canyon, Tahoe, and Yosemite the principal points they planned to visit.

  After leaving the meadow, they passed between two cinder cones and dropped back to a lower level, perhaps 7,000 feet, driving for a time across a broad plain sparsely grown with juniper; a rather bleak plain, scarred for a short distance by some abandoned effort at development. Some miles farther, the scrub began to change. Pinyon pines became prominent, looking like some needle-bearing orchard in drastic need of tending. Then ponderosa pines again, their trunks straight, their bark rusty yellow. Soon afterward, the van entered Grand Canyon National Park, following the highway to Grand Canyon Village.

  Because it was late, they went to the Visitors' Center first, before it might close, to register for their wilderness hike. While Tuuli held their place in line, Martti browsed brochures and maps, buying a plastic topographic map from a dispenser. After a few minutes, they met with the ranger on duty.

  "Where do you plan on hiking?" the man asked.

  It was Tuuli who answered. It had been her choice, based on discussion with the Diaconos. "The Barney Trail."

  The ranger smiled slightly. "Have you ever been on the Barney Trail?"

  "No, but I've hiked with people who have. I hiked with them to Sipapu and other places. They recommended it to me."

  The official face turned condescending. "I'm familiar with the trail to Sipapu. It is not the Barney Trail."

  Martti interrupted. "Did anyone say it was?"

  The ranger's eyebrows registered surprise at the response.

  "We didn't come in here to listen to sarcasm," Martti went on. Though he spoke quietly, he drew the attention of half the room. "We came in to register and get advice. If you want to advise against it, good enough, but mind your manners. And if you refuse us, you better be ready to justify it in a hearing, because I guarantee there'll be one."

  Martti Seppanen had a lot of presence when he chose to. The ranger was blushing now, and Martti was starting to. This was the sort of thing that once would have made Tuuli furious with him. She hated scenes. And ironically, he rarely created one, except in reaction to what he took as a slight to her.

  The ranger rallied. "No offense intended, sir. I only want to impress you both that the Barney Trail is dangerous. There are places where it may slide beneath your feet, for example. But the most serious risk is getting lost. Old Man Barney roughed out that trail a hundred and twelve years ago, carved it out just enough to lead burros over it, loaded with packs of ore. He last used it in 1907, before the canyon became a national park." The ranger's color was back to normal now. So was Martti's. "Since then it's washed out or slid out in numerous places, and it's entirely unmaintained. Today it's used about once a week. You can easily stray off of it onto some game trail. More than a few people have gotten lost hiking old prospector trails in the Park, an experience more than just frightening. Some have died. There's usually no water till you get to the bottom, to the river. And the hike back out involves climbing 5,000 feet—about a mile—in places up very steep slopes.

  "Also we don't go in looking for people simply because they fail to check back in. Most people don't take the trouble to. So someone has to report them missing. Perhaps the sheriff's department, when their car is reported abandoned."

  His eyebrows stood high, questioning. Tuuli smiled at him. "Thank you, Mr. Kensington." She'd read his name badge. "My husband and I both grew up in the backwoods, he in northern Michigan, I in Finnish Lapland. I've hiked a great deal this year, and he's a Choi Li Fut black belt who trains regularly, so we're reasonably fit. I believe that with a map to orient on, we'll be all right."

  Martti wrote their names and address on the register. She hadn't gotten mad at him, and for the manyeth time, he reminded himself of how much she'd changed since their visit to the Merlins. And even more since her long stay with the Diaconos. He still hadn't fully adjusted.

  "Will you be camping?" the ranger asked. "Or do you plan to stay in the village tonight?"

  "In the village, at the Harvey House," she said.

  "Well then, have a good stay and enjoy your hike. I'm sure that experienced people like yourselves won't do anything reckless."

  As they walked to their car, they agreed to go find the trailhead while it was still daylight. That would allow them an early start in the morning. They drove slowly along the narrow blacktopped road, past landmarks the Diaconos had told Tuuli about, until she said, "There!" Martti slowed, his eyes following her pointing finger, then pulled off onto the shoulder. "That tree with three small blazes, one above the other," she told him. "There should be a footpath there, maybe hard to see. The trailhead should be only about a hundred yards in. It's marked by a small sign."

  They found the path, and then by the canyon's rim, the sign—a printed, legal-sized sheet, laminated and framed. Martti read it aloud:

  !!WARNING! USE THIS TRAIL AT YOUR OWN RISK!!

  DO NOT HIKE IT WITHOUT FIRST REGISTERING AT THE NATIONAL PARK VISITORS' CENTER IN GRAND CANYON VILLAGE.

  * * *

  THE BARNEY TRAIL IS AN HISTORIC PROSPECTOR TRAIL. IT IS NOT MAINTAINED OR PATROLLED, AND IS DANGEROUS TO HIKE. IN PLACES IT DISAPPEARS; ONE CAN EASILY GET LOST. IN PLACES IT IS TREACHEROUS; ONE CAN EASILY HAVE A DANGEROUS OR FATAL FALL. THE TRAIL IS STEEP; ONE CAN EASILY BECOME EXHAUSTED AND COLLAPSE. THERE IS NO WATER TO BE HAD ABOVE THE RIVER; ONE CAN EASILY BECOME DEHYDRATED AND DIE, ESPECIALLY IN SUMMER, WHEN AIR TEMPERATURES IN THE CANYON COMMONLY EXCEED 100° (38° C).

  * * *

  DO NOT ATTEMPT TO HIKE THE BARNEY TRAIL, OR ANY OTHER UNMAINTAINED, UNPATROLLED TRAIL, IF YOU SUFFER FROM A HEART CONDITION, OR ANY OTHER CONDITION THAT RENDERS YOU SUSCEPTIBLE TO COLLAPSE. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO HIKE THIS TRAIL IF YOU ARE NOT IN VERY GOOD PHYSICAL CONDITION.

  * * *

  THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THOSE WHO CHOOSE TO USE THIS TRAIL. YOU USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. DO NOT USE IT WITHOUT FIRST REGISTERING AT THE NATIONAL PARK VISITORS' CENTER IN GRAND CANYON VILLAGE.

  * * *

  IT IS ILLEGAL TO CARRY FIREARMS IN THE PARK. IT IS ILLEGAL TO DAMAGE PLANTS OR WILDLIFE.

  THE RULE CONCERNING TRASH IS: IF YOU CARRY IT IN, YOU MUST CARRY IT OUT. DO NOT LEAVE TRASH IN THE CANYON. DO NOT BURY TRASH; WILD ANIMALS WILL SMELL
IT AND DIG IT UP. BRING YOUR TRASH OUT WITH YOU.

  artti finished reading with an irritation he knew was unreasonable. A reaction, he realized, to a public agency telling him what was good for him. Mainly they're just informing people, he chided himself, and reminding them about decent ethics.

  He looked at Tuuli. "What do you think?"

  "I think," she answered, "that after we've eaten, we should drive back out here and sleep in the van, instead of the hotel. We'll get to sleep earlier, and get an earlier start in the morning. And save ourselves money."

  * * *

  It was barely breaking dawn when their travel alarm woke them. Though the morning was near freezing, inside it was snug, thanks to the small electric heater powered by the GPC. After taking turns at the chem-pot, they washed in the tiny sink, being frugal with the water. Then they breakfasted on trail rations—rye wafers spread thick with liverwurst; rice-balls; freeze-dried pineapple slices; and a handful of raisins, washed down with decaf.

  Finally they donned sweaters and shouldered their daypacks. It occurred to Martti to take his Walther, but he recalled the regulation against firearms in the park. Leaving it in the door pocket, he locked the van and they left. Dawn had lightened enough that even in the woods they followed the path without trouble, then started down the Barney Trail. It angled downward into a steeply descending side canyon, Barney Canyon, and was difficult at first. Wherever possible they clutched shrubs. To lose one's footing there would be to slide, maybe bounce, down a steep rocky slope, certainly to injury, and possibly death.

  Yet mostly the going was not as tricky or treacherous as Martti had expected. For a time, Barney Canyon was roughly V-shaped, its slopes steep but not precipitous, with patchy shrubs. In places the trail was plain to see, still showing the signs of Old Man Barney's pick-and-shovel work. Martti thought what a tough and patient man the prospector had been, a glutton for danger and the hardest kind of labor. And wondered if, in fact, Old Man Barney had been old at the time, or if he'd been young, and the appellation added later.