Gwen pushed her chair back, got up, and walked around the table to where Grayle sat, relaxed, smiling quizzically at her. She bent down swiftly to kiss him, one hand going to his face. Her nails raked skin and he flinched. Gwen stepped back, holding out her hand for him to inspect.
"I didn't draw blood or mess up your handsome profile. A little of your skin under my nails is all I need to take with me."
"How will that help you? Maybe you didn't understand. 'Smith' is not flesh of my flesh."
"I'm not hard of hearing" she said with a touch of Eden's asperity. "Remember what I said about your subatomic structure and travel to the future?"
"Yes."
"Once I locate 'Smith' the complexities are just beginning." There was perspiration on Gwen's faintly downy upper lip. "That little matter of chaos theory. The interesting thing about theoretical physics is, almost all conclusions lead to paradoxes. I guess that's why I'm a nut on the subject. Why I'm going to try to do this. When can you have those photos for me?"
Grayle tapped out a number on his wrist pager.
"Give me half an hour. One of my secretaries will deliver them to you. I need to go to the theatre; I have a show to put on. Will you be here when I get back?"
"No," Gwen said. "But I'll leave you something to remember me by. One more thing: please hang a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door to my room. If I make it back, it could be a thousand years from now, or thirty seconds ago. If a return is possible at all; I may not have a way of fine-tuning it."
"Now you tell me." There was no censure in his voice. Until a few days ago, until Eden's doppelganger came to his attention, he had thought that he was the loneliest entity in the universe.
11:46
A.
M.
B
ertie joined Eden and Charmaine in the orangerie of the Carmen Miranda villa after her return from next door, a hasty shower, and a change of clothes:
bolero jacket, black leather pants with painted peacocks on each leg, and python-skin boots; an outfit Charmaine practically swooned over. Fashions gave them all something to chat about on a level of vapidity that allowed Bertie and Eden to converse about more serious matters subvocally.
"You're still damp behind the ears. Everything okay
?"
"Worse than we figured. The magician got to our friend here, however he works his spells, and the results ain't pretty."
"Evil enchantment, you mean."
"As good a description as any. Her lover was an Atlanta detective named Lewis Gruvver. I doubt if he played any poker last night. He's floating face up in a room-size aquarium beneath a glass floor in the master suite over there."
"Sleeping with the fishes?"
"Don't make me laugh in Charmaine's face. He's very dead. Shot once in the temple."
"Charmaine's not exactly grief-stricken, is she?"
"She hears a different drummer now. Eden, you have to go to Los Angeles, right away."
"I missed some of that, I think. Los Angeles? Tom told us not to get separated."
"This qualifies as an emergency, babe. Gruvver was an investigator on the Pledger Lee case. He got suspicious of Lincoln Grayle somehow, and he'd spent most of his time in Vegas documenting his suspicions. I read all of his notes. We already know what Grayle, or Mordaunt as he's famously known around the Vatican, has been trying to do:
kill the world's most prominent religious leaders. Many of whom are also Caretakers in some kind of holding pattern."
"Care what?"
(To Charmaine Bertie says, "Michael Kors, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Christian La Croix—and Dior, of course—depending on the season and the occasion. I never let anyone except Wendell Wyatt touch my hair, and most of the time I ask for Merope Miglietta or Roque Velacqua to do my makeup?")
"Caretakers. We'll cover that later. Right now there's a Buddhist Patriarch from Thailand at the UCLA Medical Center, kidney cancer or something. Gruvver compiled a comprehensive list of people who were entertained by Grayle after his shows, going back more than a year. Two of the people on that list showed up at the papal audience intending to murder Leoncaro. A boy named Jimmy Nixon did Pledger Lee Skeldon, remember Jimmy's sweet face? He was also on that list of Grayle's select people. And so are three others who are currently on staff at UCLA Med. A male nurse, a physical therapist, and a resident oncologist. Gruvver concluded that the Buddhist is a likely target of Mordaunt's. Makes sense to me."
(Eden, holding back a yawn with the back of her hand, says to Charmaine, "Couture? Me? Shucks no. I'm more of a connoisseur of lowbrow.")
"What could I hope to do about it?"
"Make certain that none of those three get anywhere near the Patriarch."
"How?"
"Come
on
. You're
Eden Waring
. You're famous for your premonitions."
"Notorious."
"Even better. You had four magazine covers that week. In this country alone.
Der Spiegel
went nuts over you. That Germanic theme of déjà vu. So fly down to L.A., demand to see the hospital administrator, do a number, get the old boy ironclad security."
"You know what will happen. They'll throw my butt out on the street."
"The Fox Network won't throw your butt on the street."
"Oh, God. The Fox Network."
"You must do this, Eden."
(Charmaine says to Bertie, "What are designers like? I mean, other than gay?")
"Bertie, I'm not leaving you alone with this airhead werewolf."
"Yawn again, excuse yourself to take a nap, walk out the front door, get into the van, and tell the Blackwelder guys to run you over to the airport. Don't worry about me and Charmaine. We'll do lunch, have a fun afternoon, and then I'm going to seriously fuck with her mind."
(And to Charmaine Bertie says, "Designers? They're all like monks. The sort who illuminated manuscripts, obsessing by candlelight in monkish cells. In thrall to line and form. Fresh air never touched their eyeballs. Or else they're crazy as bedbugs. Sometimes both at the same time.")
12:22 P.M.
O
ne of Lincoln Grayle's hirelings delivered an envelope to Gwen on the terrace where she'd spent the past hour and a half. Photographs. She looked briefly at several of them, slipped the photos back into the envelope, and said something to Lincoln Grayle, who was talking on his cell phone. He nodded. Gwen got up with the envelope and walked into the house, having a last glance at the magician before she disappeared.
"Looks worried," Courtney Shyla commented, lowering her rubberized binoculars.
"Did you catch a glimpse of any of those photographs?" Tom Sherard asked her.
"Couldn't tell much because of the sight lines from here," she said. "They appeared to be mostly period stuff. Men wearing high collars and bowler hats like my grandfather Wallace when he was sheriff of Rio Blanco County, Colorado. Streetcars, old cars, and trucks, what looked like a line of convicts swinging pickaxes—"
"A chain gang."
"Yeah, old stuff like that." She looked at Sherard. "Mean anything to you?"
"I'm afraid so." Sherard also looked worried. "We need to get her out of there as quickly as possible."
Lincoln Grayle had finished his conversation, closed his cell phone, and was putting it away as he rose from the table. Sunlight flashed from gold chains at his throat and on one wrist. He stretched himself, limber as a big cat; momentarily motionless and bent nearly double with his locked hands high above his shoulder blades; a tortured position maintained with ease, he seemed to look right at them.
"Did you move?" Courtney whispered to Tom.
"No." He wanted to; his bad knee was killing him.
"Okay."
They were eye to eye, faces two feet apart. Her breath had a flavor of spearmint gum. She narrowed her eyes slightly.
"What is it?"
"The sun," she said. She looked down at the walking stick in his right hand. The gold lion's head was a light from a thin shaft of sun slanting through a break in the high greenery above them. "Damn. He might have noticed that."
Sherard moved the stick slightly toward him and the lion's head lost its luminosity.
On the terrace Lincoln Grayle had turned away and was contemplating a small chest on the table.
"We're nearly three hundred yards from him," Sherard said. "His eyesight can't be that keen."
"Mine is," Courtney said a little boastfully. "On a clear mountain night I can see the two largest moons of Jupiter without a scope. Let's ease on out of here. Do we try to retrieve the subject while Grayle is still domiciled?"
"I said as quickly as possible."
"Right." Courtney started to move backward in a crouch, a hand on his sleeve. She stopped. "What is he doing now?" She steadied herself on one knee, raised her binoculars for a closer look.
Lincoln Grayle had opened the chest and was taking out several balls, each the size of a tennis ball but transparent. Plastic or glass. When he had four balls in his large hands he began to juggle them.
Courtney handed Sherard the binoculars. "He's working on hand and eye coordination. Very smooth. And it must be hard to see those balls in full daylight."
"He just added a fifth one," Sherard said.
"What talent."
"You haven't seen anything yet. Take another look."
After several seconds of studying the distant terrace through her binoculars, Courtney said softly, "Be damned." She slowly lowered the glasses, turned her face to Sherard, perplexed.
"He is a magician," Tom said with a slight smile.
"But nobody can
do
that. Leave five balls suspended in air and just walk away."
"You've missed something important."
Courtney had another look. "What? Oh, now I get it. Five balls, five points in the shape of a star."
"Or a pentagram, as the ancients called it. An occult symbol."
"Meaning what?"
"A couple of things. Grayle knows we're here, and why. The pentagram is his warning:
stay away from this house."
"Which we are going to ignore."
"You got me this far, Courtney. But the stalk is getting real now. You're under no obligation to continue."
She had a crooked grin that revealed a feral glint of tooth.
"Just like a man. Now that I'm falling in love, you want to get rid of me?"
T
hey were more than halfway from their former place of concealment on the mountain, within sight of the ribbon of blacktop that served Lincoln Grayle's secluded house, when they heard a car. They faded back into a shadowy draw where clear water trickled in a dozen streams down the mossy rock facings.
Tom had a quick look at the magician, alone in an antique silver sports car, gearing down to negotiate a sharp curve as he sped away from the house. From the sound of the engine Sherard guessed that Grayle could be driving one of the Cobra Daytona coupes from Carroll Shelby's glory days. Maybe Grayle was just out for a spin, or he was on his way to the theatre. But his absence removed a big obstacle in getting Gwen quickly out of the house.
They followed the road the rest of the way, to a stone-paved garage area beneath the first cantilevered level. Grayle also owned an Escalade, a Dodge Ram 1500 pickup with huge knobbed tires and a snowplow mount on the front bumper, and a sixteen-passenger van. There was an elevator in the garage. No one seemed to be around. They heard novelty Christmas music from an unseen speaker:
Jan and Dean's "Surfin' Santa." Courtney checked out the Cadillac SUV, grinned at Sherard, and made a turning motion with thumb and forefinger together:
key in the ignition. Tom nodded. She unzipped a pocket on her backpack and withdrew her taser gun.
On the first level of the stacked house a Hispanic girl with a single long braid down her back was running a polisher on the marble floor. She had her back to the elevator and was listening to ranchera on headphones. She didn't hear the elevator door open. Courtney handed Sherard her taser and pounced on the girl, grasping the convenient braid in her fist, clamped a gloved hand over the girl's mouth.
Sherard stepped in and wrenched off the girl's headphones; Courtney sharply pulled her head back by the braid.
"
Calma, muchacha
. Where is the red-haired guest of
El Magico
?"
"
Segundo piso
," the girl said behind Courtney's muffling hand, rolling her eyes like a horse in a burning stable. "Doan hurt me."
"Don't make us hurt you. Who else is in the house now?"
"
No se, no se
."
Courtney let go of the braid and flicked fingers in front of the girl's face. One, two, three—the girl nodded quickly at
four
, her best estimate, probably. She was still rolling her eyes when Sherard taped her mouth shut. Courtney grabbed the braid close to the roots and pulled her backward into the small elevator. The floor polisher was still running, maintaining an illusion that the girl's chores were properly being attended to. Sherard stepped into the elevator behind them. They went slowly up to the second level, Courtney continuing to hold the girl erect by her braid, speaking softly in her ear. Sherard didn't understand Spanish, but the girl calmed down; from her expression her brain had vapor-locked.