by Braun, Matt;
Birkhead again led the way, with Ruxton bringing up the rear. The only one who was armed, Birkhead carried a Colt Python .357 Magnum fitted with a silencer. If they were detected, either by the house guard or the servants, the pistol would ensure their escape. Fallon now lugged the knapsack, leaving Birkhead free to handle any emergency, and Wilson trotted along in the middle of the group.
The men were almost invisible in the bluish murk of darkness. Covered from head to toe in black—ski masks to tennis shoes—they catfooted across the lawn without a sound. Four minutes later, they darted into the shadows of the entrance pavilion.
Fallon went to his knees beside the front door, pulling out a packet of rubber gloves and a small leather case from a pocket of the knapsack. None of the men spoke as they slipped on the gloves, nor was there any need to stress urgency. Fallon already knew they were running late, that the house guard could appear at any moment. He took a locksmith's pick from the leather case and inserted its slim, flat tip into the door lock. Gently, working by feel, he probed and tested; time seemed protracted, but in less than a minute there was a distinct click. Fallon rose and turned the doorknob as footsteps sounded on the driveway. Without a word, the four men hurried inside the mansion.
The guard strolled by, stifling a yawn, an instant after the door closed.
XVII
A waning moon dimly lighted the bedroom.
Stacey lay curled alongside him, an arm thrown over his chest and her head nestled in the hollow of his shoulder. His breathing was rhythmic, shallow and even; he lay sprawled on his back, arms and legs flung wide, deep in a trancelike sleep. His eyelids fluttered and his lips moved, then he mouthed a silent cry of recognition.
. . . he walked from the vault into the outer chamber. Cautiously, quite deliberate in his movements, he avoided touching the door handle and swung the steel door closed. He waited, listening for the muffled thud of the lock bolts; then he twirled the combination knob. Wheeling around, he crossed to the entranceway and mounted the stairs.
A clock tolled as he emerged from the upper landing and limped across the foyer. At the stroke of nine the house again went silent, and a moment later he entered the study. Without hesitation, he walked straight to the liquor cabinet, took a vial from the top shelf, and emptied it into a glass beaker. His hand steadied, and he held the beaker to the light, squinting at the opaque liquid. A soft grunt became a raspy chuckle, and he nodded to himself.
Bright shafts of moonlight flooded the room, and as if drawn by impulse, he moved to the window overlooking the coastline. His expression was tranquil yet oddly jubilant, and a long while passed as he stood gazing down on the cliffs. Presently his eyes mellowed and a mystic look of reverence illuminated his features.
Then he turned up the beaker . . .
The dream coalesced into an anguished dread. A disembodied face floated past, exaggerated and distorted, as if seen in a carnival mirror. It chilled his drowsy fitfulness and jolted him into sharp awakening. The image surfaced, vividly fixed in sensory reference, and for an instant he was numbed by what he saw. His eyes popped open, dull and sightless, turned inward on something too terrible for speech.
Suddenly he grasped it. Understood. Knew that what he'd seen was the final moment. An irreversible step into the unknown. Lucas Brokaw's ultimate act of belief in his own immortality.
Yet it was still incomplete.
Why had he been chosen to have the dreams? To what purpose were these things revealed? Was it a message? Some spectral nudge he'd failed to comprehend? And after all these weeks—reliving the same dream over and over again—why at last was he shown that final moment in the study?
Why indeed? Why not last night, or the night before?
Why tonight?
The hair bristled on the back of Tanner's neck. An image fitted across his mind—Lucas Brokaw at the vault door—and unaccountably, he felt compelled to visit the estate. He knew he had to see the crypt. Tonight! Tomorrow morning wouldn't do. It had to be tonight.
Now. Before it was too late.
Tanner shifted sideways, freeing his arm, and gently eased Stacey back onto the pillow. Then he rolled out of bed and padded barefoot to the closet. As he opened the door, groping in the dark for his shirt, Stacey awakened. Her hand searched his side of the bed, moving sleepily over the empty space. After a moment it registered, and she turned her head toward the bathroom.
"Warren?"
"Over here."
"Where?" She rubbed her eyes and peered across the room. "What are you doing?"
"It's okay. I'm just getting dressed."
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong. Forget it and go back to sleep."
"Then why are you getting dressed?"
"I have to go out for a while. Turn over and go back to sleep . . . get your beauty rest."
"Out?" Suddenly she bolted upright in bed. "Out where?"
There was a deliberate pause before he spoke. His words were almost inaudible, so quiet she had to strain to hear. "The estate . . . something I want to check out."
"In the middle of the night! Warren, what is it? What's wrong?"
"I told you, nothing's wrong. Nothing at all."
"I don't believe you." She snapped on the bedside lamp and gave him a suspicious look. "You're upset about something, I can tell. Was it the dream?"
He glanced at her, on the verge of answering, then seemed to change his mind. Quickly, he began stuffing his shirt into his pants and turned back to the closet, avoiding her gaze.
"That's it, isn't it? You had another dream. And it upset you enough to make you rush out there in the middle of the night."
Still no answer. He zippered up his pants and buckled his belt.
She threw off the covers and jumped out of bed. In one motion she whipped her nightgown overhead and flung it aside. Then she hurried toward the closet.
"I'm going with you."
"No!" Tanner replied sternly, facing her. "You're staying here, that's final."
She smiled and brushed past him. "Let's not argue, darling. I said I'm going with you . . . and I am."
Her tone was pleasant but firm, and her nakedness lent a curious note of defiance to her words. Tanner chewed on his lip and stared at her backside for a moment. Then he sighed and turned away as she began rummaging through the closet.
XVIII
The house was dark and still.
Huddled together, the men waited just inside the door, listening intently, until they were certain the guard had continued on his rounds. At last, Fallon flicked on a rose-lensed penlight and led them across the foyer. He halted at the stair landing and dropped to his knees. Quickly and expertly, he examined both sides of the stone arch. Then he smiled, nodding to himself, and spoke over his shoulder, sotto voce.
"It's infrared. We'll have to crawl under. Do like I do."
He went to the floor, stretched out flat on his belly, and pushed the knapsack ahead of him onto the landing. Then he slithered through, hugging the cold stone, and climbed to his feet on the other side. Birkhead went next, wiggling through with the same snakelike crawl; then Wilson, and finally Ruxton. Gathered on the landing, they peered down the cavernous passageway, warier now than before. A moment passed. Then, according to plan, Fallon again took the lead. His first job was to get them safely through the alarm systems. Failing that, the entire operation would be scrubbed.
Their descent along the winding staircase was painstakingly slow. Not only was Fallon checking the hewn steps and the walls for hidden alarms, but all of them felt a sense of entering another world, an eerie subterranean abyss stretching endlessly into the bowels of the earth. There was a dank, fetid quality to the spiraling corridor, which grew worse as they approached the innermost depths of the cliff. Though the air was cool and clammy, all four men were sweating heavily by the time they reached the bottom landing.
After a quick inspection of the entranceway, Fallon signaled all clear and stepped into the outer chamber. The others cr
owded close behind, then abruptly pulled up short, made momentarily speechless by the sight. While they'd known generally what to expect, it was far more impressive than any of them had imagined, an excavation feat of such scope that suddenly they were forced to consider, after all, whether they were a match for the man bold enough to have envisioned such a crypt.
Then Ruxton chuckled, mocking himself, struck by the absurdity of grown men being intimidated by a ghost. Later, looking back, he would remember the moment and regret the chuckle. But now, feeling devilishly clever, he ripped off his ski mask and cocked his head in a smug grin.
"My friends, I congratulate you. It went off like clockwork."
Everyone smiled except Fallon. He was staring around the room, his forehead wrinkled in a frown. As if thinking out loud, he grunted and wagged his head back and forth.
"You know, it's funny. After somebody went to all this trouble, you'd think they'd have the place loaded with TV cameras or laser beams or some damn thing. But there's nothing . . . zilch! Beats the hell out of me why some clown hasn't ripped it off before."
"Let's not have any famous last words," Ruxton commented. "I seem to recall a little matter of explosives in there," he jerked his chin at the vault, "not to mention opening the door itself."
"That!" Fallon sneered. "Hell, that's a piece of cake."
"I suggest you save your bragging for later. And remember what I told you . . . we take nothing for granted. Brokaw had a very tricky mind, so we operate on the premise that nothing is as it appears to be. Now, suppose we go to work." He glanced at his watch. "We have precisely three hours and four minutes to get the job done and get out."
Fallon grumbled something to himself, then knelt down and began loosening the straps on the knapsack. Opening it, he took out an oilskin pouch containing the camera and a set of screwdrivers and handed it to Wilson. With considerably more care, he then extracted a bulky object that was wrapped in several layers of foam rubber. He pulled slipknots on the thongs holding it together and slowly removed the padding. Underneath all the spongy rubber was an object that appeared at first glance to be a portable television set. It was something else entirely.
The device was a marvel of space age technology and one of a kind. It had been built for Fallon by a former physicist on the Apollo Project. Not surprisingly, the physicist had met with an untimely and fatal accident shortly afterward, which gave Fallon a monopoly on the machine and had thus far kept him out of jail.
Weighing some twenty pounds, the device was roughly a foot square and perhaps eight inches in width, with handles projecting off either side. On the front was a steel disk embedded with crystal sensor elements. On the back was a monitor screen that produced an electronic graph similar in appearance to an electrocardiogram. The guts of the machine consisted of an ultrasonic transducer powered by a nuclear energy cell. The transducer emitted signals through the sensor elements; these ultrasonic signals penetrated the mass of any target object to the depth of its opposite side. The signals then bounced back to the monitor screen, producing a graph of the internal structure of the target object. It was an ultrasonic scanning device that gave the operator a glimpse of the inner workings of the object under scrutiny.
As Fallon had remarked, the steel doors found on bank vaults were a piece of cake. Of equal significance, the device came equipped with a unique and rather revolutionary attachment. It allowed him to listen to the ultrasonic bleeps, which translated to a form of eavesdropping on the tumblers inside a vault door.
Birkhead was fascinated by the device, as was Ruxton; for a while they hovered around watching Fallon's every move. But it required several tests to make the device operational, and Ruxton finally grew bored. While Fallon continued to fiddle with the control knobs, Ruxton turned away and walked back to the cryptography machine. Wilson was already busy at work with his screwdriver, very methodical and very careful, at great pains not to scratch the metal cover. Humming softly to himself, he slowly worked his way around the machine, treating it with the affection another man might have lavished on a woman. Ruxton stopped beside him, observing quietly for a moment, then smiled.
"How's it going, Chester? Any problems?"
"Not, not at all. She's being very cooperative. A perfect lady. And an extremely unusual design, I might add. Quite advanced. Knew that the instant I saw the control panel."
"Excellent. Now you'll be able to find out for yourself, won't you . . . about Brokaw's reputation as a genius?"
"Yes indeed! By all means. In fact . . . we're about to see what makes this little lady work."
Wilson removed the last screw and laid his screwdriver on the table. With a sort of loving tenderness, he lifted the cover and swung it aside, bending forward to examine the innards of the machine. Suddenly his face blanched, and he rocked back on his heels, staring incredulously at what he'd uncovered.
"Oh, my God! Look, Curt! Look what he's done."
XIX
Tanner drove like a man possessed.
His eyes were glued to the road and he kept the speedometer hovering around ninety. Stacey huddled in the corner, watching him nervously, thankful there were so few cars on the freeway. Since leaving Palo Alto, she hadn't spoken a word, fearful of distracting him. But as they approached the outskirts of San Francisco, she couldn't contain herself any longer.
"Warren, why not slow down a little? At least until we're through the city. If you get stopped for speeding, we'll lose all the time we've gained."
Tanner tromped the accelerator. "To hell with 'em! I haven't got time to spare. Any cop gets on my tail, he'll just have to take his chances."
Stacey fell silent a moment. There was a fixity of expression on Tanner's face that bordered on desperation. She sensed now that he was beyond reason and knew it was useless to try. Yet he seemed rational, and if she got him talking, it might have a calming effect. Finally, with the needle pushing a hundred, she decided that distracting him might be the lesser evil.
"You're afraid, aren't you, Warren?"
"Afraid! Jesus, how'd you come up with that?"
"I'm serious. You're afraid of what we'll find at the mansion. It's written all over you."
"And you know an open book when you see one, is that it?"
"No, that's not it. But I do know that something . . . strange happened tonight. You had a different dream, didn't you?"
His eyes flicked at her in a quick, sideways glance. "What makes you think that?"
"Darling, please, give me a little credit! What else could explain this madness? Do you realize you could get us both killed the way you're driving?"
"So?"
"So unless you have a very large death wish—which you don't—then something happened to set you off."
"And you figure it was the dream?"
"Not the dream. Another dream. Or at least a variation—something new—something you hadn't seen before."
"Nice deduction. You should've been a detective."
"Then it's true . . . isn't it?"
"You're the one with all the answers. You tell me."
"No, I have a much better idea, darling. You tell me." She leaned across the seat and gently stroked the back of his neck. "You've been lying to me by omission for weeks. Don't you think it's time you took me into your confidence—before we get to the mansion?"
"You mean the dream . . . what I saw tonight."
"I mean all of it, everything you've been hiding. The way you act, it's a very big load, and I believe I've earned the right to help carry it, don't you?"
There was a long reflective pause while Tanner thought it over. Tonight's dream had shaken him far more than he cared to admit, and he realized it was a burden he could no longer manage by himself. He needed someone he could trust, someone who would listen and believe and help him sort it out. Someone who wouldn't think he'd gone off the deep end.
So he told her everything.
Those odd, almost surreal flashes of déjà vu. The investigation that led him to Professo
r Ludmann. The chilling voice of Lucas Brokaw—and his former incarnation—on a tape unheard by anyone for the past thirty years. Then the dreams, commencing the very night he'd listened to the tape, explicit in every detail but curiously abbreviated, like a film clip from an old movie. Until tonight, when at last he'd seen how Lucas Brokaw ended it. Which left only one question. Perhaps the most disturbing question of all.
Why him? Why Warren Tanner?
Stacey listened, appalled by the enormity of what he'd discovered, but she had no ready answer. It was too much too quickly. She needed time to analyze it, for the only common denominator was Lucas Brokaw and that led inevitably to the very question Warren himself had raised. Why indeed had he been selected?
But there was no time. Even now they were less than two hours from the estate and—God! The thought struck her with the force of a polar wind, chilled her to the bone. She had accepted it! Without question, never once conscious of it while he talked, she had accepted the only premise that made sense. Lucas Brokaw existed, dead yet not dead! An unseen force, perhaps even a presence, returned from the grave.
At last, too astounded to lie, she simply blurted out the truth. "You believe it was a message, don't you? That tonight dream was some sort of psychic vision."
"Let's just say it was too strong to be ignored."
"And you believe the crypt is being violated . . . tonight! That's it, isn't it?"
"Stace, I don't believe . . . I know."
Tanner hit the accelerator and roared down off the expressway. Before them loomed the Golden Gate Bridge, and beyond, the darkened hills of Marin County. High in the sky, obscured by westerly clouds, the moon drifted seaward and the ebb tide lay still.
XX
Ruxton had expected to encounter problems tonight, and Wilson's shock came as no great surprise. But he knew that technology alone would never solve those problems; to succeed, the operation required guidance and a steadying hand. So he kept his own expression bland, as, bending closer, he peered into the machine. Though he'd read a good deal on the subject and understood the basic principles of cipher machines, he was startled by what he saw. Inside the machine was an incomprehensible maze of wiring and fittings, ratchets and gears, and several oddly constructed wheels, a bewildering array of hardware. But he merely nodded and smiled, seemingly unruffled, and finally glanced up at Wilson.
