The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  “I don’t see what’s so wrong with that,” Delia said.

  Mel sat back in his chair and thought about the things that had been happening in his life in the past few days. “Yes,” he said, nodding distantly. “I suppose so, eventually. Life does seem to be heading in that direction.”

  The next morning he left Pensacola on a westbound flight to San Francisco. Stephanie would travel directly from Boston and meet him there. The next couple of days, he reflected, would perhaps be the toughest time for her of all.

  CHAPTER 19

  “… into thy hands we commend the spirit of thy servant, Stephanie.” The minister raised his eyes to glance at the black-clad mourners seated beneath the awning set up at the graveside to shade off the California sun. “Rise, please. Oh Lord, to whom…”

  In the third row, behind the seats reserved for immediate family, Mel felt a lumpiness growing in his throat as the attendants began lowering the coffin with its covering of flowers. His feelings were intensified all the more by the inner knowledge that of all those present, he alone at that moment was thinking of Eva. It seemed a cold, unjust way for a life to end. He looked along the lines in front of him—solemn uncles, tearful aunts, cousins, the younger brother, Andrew, Eva’s mother shaking visibly, and the father steadying her arm; all of those who had been closest… and they didn’t even know. So he tried in his mind to compensate for all of them, remembering the person she had been: the intense student, talking eloquently outside on the deck of the Brodsteins’ house against a background of ocean beach and blue sky, or craning forward over her desk at lectures; the fair-haired, long-legged shapeliness that had turned heads on campus lawns and city sidewalks; the thinker, to whom ideas were the greatest stimulant, with a maturity beyond her years, and who could accept anything with forbearance except culpable ignorance and the spectacle of an able mind going to waste. He thought about the apartment that had been the expression of her, and the first time he had gone there… about a spirit so consumed with the ideals of freedom and individualism that her life had become a personification of them.

  There had been times when he thought of her as callous, in his hurt and rage, long ago now, when he had tried to possess what couldn’t be possessed. And in the end he had left, either to forget or to come to terms with it. And in the time that had passed since, he thought he had grown to understand better what she had been. He had hoped to be able to tell her that one day. Now, he never would.

  When the ceremony was over, he joined the other friends in offering final sympathies to the family.

  “You do your best, you spend years of your life… and it ends like this. You never know, do you?” Her father blinked and dabbed hastily at his face with a handkerchief. Then he recovered his composure. “Anyhow, Mel, it was good of you to come. It’s been a while. What are you up to these days?”

  “Law—a small firm up in Boston.”

  “So, you gave up computers, eh? Oh, well… How’s it going? Making out okay?”

  “Sure. I’m okay.”

  “It was such a pity that Eva wasn’t here,” her mother said. “Have you seen her at all lately? You seemed very close once.”

  “No, I haven’t seen her for a long time,” Mel said.

  “We’ve gotten used to being without Eva. She was so distant, wrapped up in her own way of life. This is like losing both of them.”

  “Are you coming along to the house?” their father asked. “Some of us will be getting together there…”

  Mel stared past the group and into the distance, at the gateway into the cemetery, flanked by banks of rhododendron and laurel. The figure who had been watching from outside was still there. She was wearing a long coat and hat, and held her collar high about her face despite the weather. As Mel looked, she turned and walked away.

  “Thanks,” he said. “But I have to be getting along.”

  “It was good of you to come,” her father said again.

  “The least I could do,” Mel replied.

  After a few more minutes of exchanging words with some of the others there that he had met before, he walked over to his car, parked with the others in a line nearby, pulled forward a short distance to turn at an intersection with another of the gravel roads crossing the cemetery, and drove out by the gate through which the cortège had entered.

  He picked up Stephanie a quarter mile farther along the road. She was calm, but not talkative. He glanced at her from time to time as they drove, and at one time laid a hand on her arm reassuringly. She returned a quick smile that said she was okay. In his concern, he failed to notice the black Buick that had been parked a short distance from the cemetery gates, which was now following them.

  • • •

  They drove westward out of the San Mateo area, taking the Route 92 bridge across the Crystal Springs Reservoir—actually a flooded section of the San Andreas fault—and over the Coast Range to Half Moon Bay. There, they turned north on Highway 1, a scenic coastal road that hugged the cliffs in a spectacular succession of roller-coaster bends, dips, climbs, and curves, all the way from Santa Barbara, two hundred miles to the south. With the Pacific Ocean stretching away to the left, they passed small beaches and rocky coves, alternating with tiny fishing villages turned into resort attractions. Inland from the road the land rose to the ridges of the Coast Range, rounded and green at the top, with scattered clusters of houses on the lower slopes. There was a small airfield, and beyond it the radar dishes and communications antennae of the Pillar Point tracking station, where Brett had worked for a while. Stephanie grew tight-lipped and tense, and Mel drove on in moody silence, wondering why people insisted on inflicting things like this on themselves.

  Farther on, the houses petered out, giving way to bleak hills of grass and exposed rock, and the road began winding and climbing. There was little traffic. Mel caught occasional glimpses of a black car a short distance behind, but paid little attention to it. The road became a twisting ledge scratched high along a series of precipitous drops, where whole mountainsides had slid away to form immense sweeps of bare rock plummeting sheer to the water. Between them, the road cut through the rocky spines that had been left jutting out into the sea. This was where Stephanie had wanted to come. Ahead of them, Mel spotted a turnout cut into the crumbly rock on the side of the road away from the edge. He pulled into it, stopped the car, and switched off the engine. He said nothing, but sat looking out through the windshield.

  Stephanie got out and walked across the road to a shallow mound of rubble fringing the far side, above the drop. She climbed the mound, moved cautiously a couple of paces forward to the edge, and stood staring down. She had taken off her hat in the car, and her hair and coat flapped around her in the wind, causing her to draw her collar close about her face. Mel watched from the driver’s seat of the car, giving her a few minutes to be alone with her own thoughts. Then he climbed out and went across to join her.

  The wall of rock curved outward and away on both sides of them to form an immense bite. Far below, the sea crashed into it in angry surges of white foam streaked with green, boiling around rocks and debris fallen from above, before withdrawing sullenly and consolidating for the next onslaught. A few feet beneath them, the outlet of a metal drain conduit from beneath the roadway protruded from the face to empty into a gully that fell almost vertically for several hundred feet to the water’s edge. And as Mel stood next to Stephanie, staring down at the scene, his mind went back once more over the years to happier times and another face that would come into his life no more…

  What a day this was turning out to be.

  From the inquiries that Stephanie had made, Mel knew that Devil’s Slide had a reputation as a black spot for accidents. A rescue team from the local sheriff’s department had gone down on ropes to conduct the initial investigation and examination of the wreck. After that, a helicopter and boat search by the Coast Guard had failed to locate the body, which again was not uncommon—the victims were frequently thrown clear of the vehicle in
Devil’s Slide accidents and carried out to sea. The final report, filed by the California Highway Patrol, had classified it as a straightforward accident, with no suggestion of foul play.

  “I don’t believe it,” Stephanie said finally, raising her voice above the wind. She continued staring down as she spoke, not taking her eyes off the waves breaking and swirling around the rocks below. “I’ve driven this road a hundred times with Brett. He wasn’t a drunk or a Sunday tourist. He’d never have just gone off like that. I know he wouldn’t have.”

  “It sure doesn’t seem like the kind of—” Stephanie had turned her face as Mel started speaking, but she shifted her gaze as something beyond him caught her attention. Her eyes widened in sudden alarm.

  “Mel!”

  He turned abruptly. The Buick that had followed them from the cemetery was parked on the shoulder, partly visible around the last bend. Two men were coming toward them, one slightly ahead, heftily built and wearing a navy blazer, the other in a tan suit. Moving purposefully, the man in the blazer reached out toward Stephanie. Mel heard her scream in terror. Panicked by the thought of the drop only feet behind him, he succumbed to pure, animal, survival reflexes and was only half-aware of himself scooping a rock the size of a football up off the ground and heaving it at the other assailant’s head.

  “Jesus!…” The man in the tan suit raised his arms to ward off the rock. Mel hurled himself away from the edge and tore at the arm of the one grappling with Stephanie. The man held her with one arm and tried to push Mel off with the other. The three of them swayed, locked together, Stephanie still screaming and clawing with her nails, and for an instant it seemed that they would all pitch over into the abyss together. Then the man in the tan suit grabbed both Mel and the other’s jackets and yanked them back down off the mound fringing the edge. He tripped as Mel fell onto him, and then Mel tumbled over too, but at the same time managed to grab the legs of the one who was holding Stephanie.

  “Goddammit! …” the one in the blazer snarled, trying to beat Mel’s arms away with his free hand.

  Then Stephanie broke away. “The car!” Mel yelled at her desperately. “The keys are inside!” But the other man, the one in the tan suit, was already on his feet again and blocked her, seizing both her wrists in his hands. She kicked out and tried to shake herself free, but he was too strong. Then the one in the blazer regained his balance, and Mel felt himself hauled to his feet, spun around, and his arm clamped and a wrist locked across his throat in a hold that left him unable to move.

  The man in the tan suit had moved his grip to Stephanie’s arms and was shaking her… but more imploringly than roughly. “Eva! What the hell do you think you’re doing? What’s the matter with you? Don’t you recognize us?”

  “Not here,” the other said from behind Mel’s ear. “Anyone could come by. Get ’em in the car, for chrissakes.”

  Mel was propelled irresistibly across to the Buick, feeling as if his arm was on the verge of snapping at every step, and bundled into the backseat. The man in the blazer piled in alongside releasing Mel’s arm, but keeping a cautioning grip on his shoulder—unnecessary, since now that Mel’s adrenalin surge had run down, he was past trying any further heroics. The other man steered Stephanie over to their own car, and keeping a hold on her arm with one hand, took the keys from the ignition and locked it up before bringing her back to the Buick. He heaved her into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and walked quickly around to climb in the driver’s side. “Back to the hotel?” he said, glancing back as they pulled away.

  “Where else?” the man next to Mel replied.

  The other thing that had subdued Mel was a feeling, now that he had calmed down a little, that the actions of these two men had not really been motivated by hostility. His first instinctive assumption had been that they were Soviets, but now he wasn’t sure. For if they were, then from the few words he heard, the KGB was doing its recruiting a long way from home these days. And the man in the tan suit had called Stephanie “Eva.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The Constitutional party’s headquarters was situated on K Street in Washington, D.C., between Vermont Avenue and the greenery of Franklin Square. In a room on the fifth floor, Ronald Bassen, executive chief of the party’s security apparatus, stood looking at a wallscreen that was showing George Slade, one of his operatives, speaking from California.

  Bassen, a solidly built, dour-faced man with a fleshy complexion, droopy eyelids, and straight black hair combed flat, was a one-time policeman, turned private security agent, now filling out a little and getting jowly above the collar. Prior to his current retainer with the Constitutionals, he had worked as a private bodyguard, contracting to protect notables and public figures, from business executives and visiting political exiles to religious gurus and pop singers, against threats to their lives and safety, real and imagined. His way of making a living had bred the hard-headed kind of attitude that the best way for people to learn fast and develop a sense of responsibility was to experience the consequences of their own decisions and mistakes. Though previously politically indifferent, he had been drawn to the Constitutionals by a growing conviction that a large share of the problems that he saw every day were the products of misguided idealists bent on creating a society that was achieving exactly the opposite. That was okay by him if they were spending their own money. But that wasn’t good enough for them; they were taking his. The Constitutional philosophy of denying anyone’s right to spend someone else’s money had suited his frame of disgruntlement admirably. He had provided his services to the party voluntarily to begin with, then professionally on a regular basis, and he now contracted exclusively to them full-time.

  It had been a hectic year for everyone connected with the organization, and not least its security people. The surprise result of the New Hampshire primary in February—traditionally an early barometer of public mood and an indicator of the leading issues of the day—had signaled the nation’s terminal weariness with more-of-the-same formulas that never delivered, and finally revealed the new Constitutional platform as the first thing to have truly excited people in years. Reacting belatedly to what they should have been alert to long before, the two traditional parties had then come up with a mixed bag of token concessions of their own, hastily cobbled together after the Constitutional model. But the people, recognizing an insult to their collective intelligence for once, rejected the imitation and registered their contempt and derision in the even greater Constitutional victories at the primary elections in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Alaska, Illinois, and New York, held from March through July. Now that the final verdict was in, there would be the backlash of all the defeated and frustrated passions that had built up through the campaign. The Constitutional victory had particularly incensed the extremist factions of both political polar regions, and with all kinds of crazies on the loose from rabid Bible freaks avenging Jesus to demented Trotskyites out to save the Revolution, there was more than enough going on to keep Bassen and his people busy and worried. And now, on top of everything else, all he’d needed was to learn that they’d screwed up out on the West Coast.

  “What else could we do?” Slade asked from the screen. He was calling from a suite in the San Francisco airport hotel where he and Larry Molineaux had checked in after arriving from Washington, following Newell’s priority directive to find Eva. “We brought them both back here. They’re in the next room with Larry. We need directions on how to play it from here.”

  Bassen passed a hand agitatedly across his brow. He had paced away from the screen and turned to look back at it from the window. “How are they acting?” he asked.

  “Pretty calm, as a matter of fact. No screaming fits or threats to call the cops—yet, anyway. But the guy’s starting to get demanding, and he seems to know what he’s talking about.”

  “And they won’t say who they are?”

  “Why should they? He wants to know who we thought they were first, and who we are. What am I supposed to say? We�
��ve got an open-and-shut case here of assault, abduction, forcible detention…”

  “You’re telling me, George?”

  At that moment the door opened and a slimly built man came in, wearing the pants and vest of a gray, glen-check suit, the vest unbuttoned, and shirt cuffs rolled back. It was Warren Landis, who ran the organization’s intelligence arm. With his large brow and head balding prematurely in his late thirties, heavy-rimmed glasses, trimmed beard, and polka-dot bow tie, he fitted Bassen’s image of the archetypal intellectual, always methodical, analytical, and impossible to panic because he never quite seemed to make the final connection with the real world in which people could get hurt. Landis folded his arms and rested his butt against the edge of a desk, facing the screen. “So what’s this about getting the wrong girl?” He glanced at Bassen, then looked back at the image of Slade. “How could you? I thought that you and Larry both knew her personally.”

  “It’s either that or she’s got total amnesia,” Slade said from the screen.

  Landis’s brow creased into furrows. “But wasn’t she at the sister’s funeral? I thought someone said her old boyfriend picked her up. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “She wasn’t actually at the funeral,” Bassen said.

  “She watched it from outside the gate,” Slade explained.

  “Her own sister’s?” Landis looked mystified. “This is getting stranger.” He looked at Bassen. “Just to be sure I’m in the picture, run the whole thing by me again, would you, Ron? In brief.”

  Bassen moved a couple of paces back from the window. “It’s been a week now since Eva took off. First, it’s simply not like her to disappear for that long without letting anyone know, and with it being election time and this Kirkelmayer situation just coming to the boil, it’s even stranger.” He shrugged. “Maybe it had something to do with her sister committing suicide in Denver… But anyhow, we’d drawn blanks everywhere else, and there was a chance that she’d show up for the funeral. So, we had George and Larry stake out the cemetery…” Bassen waved a hand at the screen. “You take it from there, George.” He turned away to face the window.