my wallet."
Taking no chances, they cuffed him before fishing his wallet out of his
hip pocket. The steel bracelets were still warm from the heated air of
the patrol car.
He felt exactly as if he were a character in one of his own novels.
It was decidedly not a good feeling.
The second siren died. Car doors slammed. He heard the crackling
static and tinny voices of police-band radios.
"You have any photo ID in here?" asked the cop who had taken his
wallet.
Marty rolled his left eye, trying to see something of the man above
knee-level. "Yeah, of course, in one of those plastic windows, a
driver's license."
In his novels, when innocent characters were suspected of crimes they
hadn't committed, they were often worried and afraid.
But Marty had never written about the humiliation of such an experience.
Lying on the frigid blacktop, prone before the police officers,.he was
mortified as never before in his life, even though he'd done nothing
wrong. The situation itself--being in a position of utter submission
while regarded with deep suspicion by figures of authority--seemed to
trigger some innate guilt, a congenital sense of culpability identified,
feelings of shame because he was going to be found out, even though he
knew there was nothing for which he could be blamed.
"How old is this picture on your license?" asked the cop with his
wallet.
"Uh, I don't know, two years, three."
"Doesn't look much like you."
"You know what DMV photos are like," Marty said, dismayed to hear more
plea than anger in his voice.
"Let him up, it's all right, he's my husband, he's Marty Stillwater,"
Paige shouted, evidently hurrying toward them from the Delorios' house.
Marty couldn't see her, but her voice gladdened him and restored a sense
of reality to the nightmarish moment.
He told himself that everything was going to be all right. The cops
would recognize their error, let him up, search the shrubbery around the
house and in neighbors' yards, quickly find the look-alike, and arrive
at an explanation for all the weirdness of the past hour.
"He's my husband," Paige repeated, much closer now, and Marty could
sense the cops staring at her as she approached.
He was blessed with an attractive wife who was well worth staring at
even when rain-soaked and distraught, she wasn't merely attractive but
smart, charming, amusing, loving, singular. His daughters were great
kids. He had a prospering career as a novelist, and he profoundly
enjoyed his work. Nothing was going to change any of that. Nothing.
Yet even as the cops removed the handcuffs and helped him to his feet,
even as Paige hugged him and as he embraced her gratefully, Marty was
acutely and uncomfortably aware that twilight was giving way to
nightfall. He looked over her shoulder, searching countless shadowed
places along the street, wondering from which nest of darkness the next
attack would come. The rain seemed so cold that it ought to have been
sleet, the emergency beacons stung his eyes, his throat burned as if
he'd gargled with acid, his body ached in a score of places from the
battering he had taken, and instinct told him that the worst was yet to
come.
No.
No, that wasn't instinct speaking. That was just his overactive
imagination at work. The curse of the writer's imagination. Always
searching for the next plot twist.
Life wasn't like fiction. Real stories didn't have second and third
acts, neat structures, narrative pace, escalating denouements.
Crazy things just happened, without the logic of fiction, and then life
went on as usual.
The policemen were all watching him hug Paige.
He thought he saw hostility in their faces.
Another siren swelled in the distance.
He was so cold.
The Oklahoma night made Drew Oslett uneasy. Mile after mile, on both
sides of the interstate highway, with rare exception, the darkness was
so deep and unrelenting that he seemed to be crossing a bridge over an
enormously wide and bottomless abyss. Thousands of stars salted the
sky, suggesting an immensity that he preferred not to consider.
He was a creature of the city, his soul in tune with urban bustle.
Wide avenues flanked by tall buildings were the largest open spaces with
which he was entirely comfortable. He had lived for many years in New
York, but he had never visited Central Park, those fields and vales were
encircled by the city, yet Oslett found them sufficiently large and
bucolic to make him edgy. He was in his element only in sheltering
forests of highrises, where sidewalks teemed with people and streets
were jammed with noisy traffic. In his midtown Manhattan apartment, he
slept with no drapes over the windows, so the ambient light of the
metropolis flooded the room. When he woke in the night, he was
comforted by periodic sirens, blaring horns, drunken shouts, car-rattled
manhole covers, and other more exotic noises that rose from the streets
even during the dead hours, though at diminished volume from the
glorious clash and jangle of mornings, afternoons, and evenings. The
continuous cacophony and infinite distractions of the city were the silk
of his cocoon, protecting him, ensuring that he would never find himself
in the quiet circumstances that encouraged contemplation and
introspection.
Darkness and silence offered no distraction and were, therefore, enemies
of contentment. Rural Oklahoma had too damned much of both.
Slightly slumped in the passenger seat of the rented Chevrolet, Drew
Oslett shifted his attention from the unnerving landscape to the
state-of-the-art electronic map that he was holding on his lap.
The device was as big as an attache case, though square instead of
rectangular, and operated off the car battery through a cigarette
lighter plug. The flat top of it resembled the front of a television
set, mostly screen with a narrow frame of brushed steel and a row of
control buttons. Against a softly luminous lime-green background,
interstate highways were indicated in emerald green, state routes in
yellow, and county roads in blue, unpaved dirt and gravel byways were
represented by broken black lines. Population centers--precious few in
this part of the world--were pink.
Their vehicle was a red dot of light near the middle of the screen.
The dot moved steadily along the emerald-green line that was Interstate
40.
"About four miles ahead now," Oslett said.
Karl Clocker, the driver, did not respond. Even in the best of times,
Clocker was not much of a conversationalist. The average rock was more
talkative.
The square screen of the electronic map was set to a mid-range scale,
displaying a hundred square miles of territory in a ten-mile-by-ten-mile
grid. Oslett touched one of the buttons, and the map blinked off,
replaced almost instantly by a twenty-five-square-mile block, five miles
on a side, that enlarged one quadrant of the first picture to fill
the
screen.
The red dot representing their car was now four times larger than
before. It was no longer in the center of the picture but off to the
right side.
Near the left end of the display, less than four miles away, a blinking
white X remained stationary just a fraction of an inch to the right of
Interstate 40. X marked the prize.
Oslett enjoyed working with the map because the screen was so colorful,
like the board of a well-designed video game. He liked video games a
lot. In fact, although he was thirty-two, some of his favorite places
were arcades, where arrays of cool machines tantalized the eye with
strobing light in every color and romanced the ear with incessant beeps,
tweets, buzzes, hoots, whoops, waw-waws, clangs, booms, riffs of music,
and oscillating electronic tones.
Unfortunately, the map had none of the action of a game. And it lacked
sound effects altogether.
Still, it excited him because not just anyone could get his hands on the
device which was called a SATU, for Satellite Assisted Tracking Unit. It
wasn't sold to the public, partly because the cost was so exorbitant
that potential purchasers were too few to justify marketing it broadly.
Besides, some of the technology was encumbered by strict
national-security prohibitions against dissemination. And because the
map was primarily a tool for serious clandestine tracking and
surveillance, most of the relatively small number of existing units were
currently used by federally controlled law-enforcement and
intelligence-gathering agencies or were in the hands of similar
organizations in co
"Three miles," he told Clocker.
The hulking driver did not even grunt by way of reply.
Wires trailed from the SATU and terminated in a three-inch-diameter
suction cup that Oslett had fixed to the highest portion of the curved
windshield. A locus of microminiature electronics in the base of the
cup was the transmitter and receiver of a satellite up-link package.
Through coded bursts of microwaves, the SATU cculd quickly interface
with scores of geosynchronous communication and survey satellites owned
by private industry and various military services, override their
security systems, insert its program in their logic units, and enlist
them in its operations without either disturbing their primary functions
or alerting their ground monitors to the invasion.
By using two satellites to search for--and get a lock on--the unique
signal of a particular transponder, the SATU could triangulate a precise
position for the carrier of that transponder. Usually the target
transmitter was an inconspicuous package that had been planted in the
undercarriage of the surveillance subject's can-sometimes in his plane
or boat--so he could be followed at a distance without ever being aware
that someone was tailing him.
In this case, it was a transponder hidden in the rubber heel and sole of
a shoe.
Oslett used the SATU controls to halve the area represented on the
screen, thereby dramatically enlarging the details on the map.
Studying the new but equally colorful display, he said, "He's still not
moving. Looks like maybe he's pulled off the side of the road in a rest
stop."
The SATU microchips contained detailed maps of every square mile of the
continental United States, Canada, and Mexico. If Oslett had been
operating in Europe, the Mideast or elsewhere, he could have installed
the suitable cartographical library for that territory.
"Two and a half miles," Oslett said.
Driving with one hand, Clocker reached under his sportcoat and withdrew
the revolver he carried in a shoulder holster. It was a Colt .357
Magnum, an eccentric choice of weaponry--and somewhat dated--for a man
in Karl Clocker's line of work. He also favored tweed jackets on the
elbows, and on occasion--as now--leather lapels. He had an eccentric
collection of sweater vests with bold harlequin patterns, one of which
he was currently wearing. His brightly colored socks were usually
chosen to clash with everything else, and without fail he wore brown
suede Hush Puppies. Considering his size and demeanor, no one was
likely to comment negatively on his taste in clothes, let alone make
unasked-for observations about his choice of handguns.
"Won't need heavy firepower," Oslett said.
Without saying a word to Oslett, Clocker put the .357 Magnum on the seat
beside him, next to his hat, where he could get to it easily.
"I've got the trank gun," Oslett said. "That should do it."
Clocker didn't even look at him.
Before Marty would agree to get out of the rainswept street and tell the
watch over Charlotte and Emily at the Delorios' house. He trusted Vic
and Kathy to do anything necessary to protect the girls.
But they would not be a match for the vicious relentlessness of The
Other.
He wasn't sanguine that even a well-armed guard was enough protection.
On the Delorios' front porch, rain streamed from the overhang.
It looked like holiday tinsel in the glow of the brass hurricane lamp.
Sheltering there, Marty tried to make Vic understand the girls were
still in danger. "Don't let anyone in except the cops or Paige."
"Sure, Marty." Vic was a physical-education teacher, coach of the local
high-school swimming team, Boy Scout troop leader, primary motivator
behind their street's Neighborhood Watch program, and organizer of
various annual charity fund drives, an earnest and energetic guy who
enjoyed helping people and who wore athletic shoes even on occasions
when he also wore a coat and tie, as if more formal footwear would not
allow him to move as fast and accomplish as much as he wished. "Nobody
but the cops or Paige. Leave it to me, the kids will be okay with me
and Kathy. Jesus, Marty what happened over there?"
"And for God's sake, don't give the girls to anyone, cops or anyone,
unless Paige is with them. Don't even give them to me unless Paige is
with me."
Vic Delorio looked away from the police activity and blinked in
surprise.
In memory, Marty could hear the look-alike's angry voice, see the flecks
of spittle flying from his mouth as he raged, I want my life, my Paige .
. . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .
"You understand, Vic?"
"Not to you?"
"Only if Paige is with me. Only then."
"What--"
"I'll explain later," Marty interrupted. "Everybody's waiting for me."
He turned and hurried along the front walk toward the street, looking
back once to say, "Only Paige."
. . . my Paige . . . my Charlotte, my Emily . . .
At home, in the kitchen, while recounting the assault to the officer who
had caught the call and been first on the scene, Marty allowed a police
technician to ink his fingers and roll them on a record sheet.
They needed to be able to differentiate between his prints and those of
the intruder. He wondered if he and The Other would prove t
o be as
identical in that regard as they seemed in every other.
Paige also submitted to the process. It was the first time in their
lives that either of them had been fingerprinted. Though Marty
understood the need for it, the whole process seemed invasive.
After he got what he required, the technician moistened a paper towel
with a glycerol cleanser and said that it would remove all the ink. It
didn't. No matter how hard he rubbed, dark stains remained in the
whorls of his skin.
Before sitting down to make a more complete statement to the officer in
charge, Marty went upstairs to change into dry clothes.
He also took four Anacin.
He turned up the thermostat, and the house quickly overheated.
But periodic shivers still plagued him--largely because of the unnerving
presence of so many police officers.
They were everywhere in the house. Some were in uniforms, others were
not, and all of them were strangers whose presence made Marty feel
further violated.
He hadn't anticipated how utterly a victim's privacy was peeled away
beginning the moment he reported a serious crime. Policemen and
technicians were in his office to photograph the room where the violent
confrontation had begun, dig a couple of bullets out of the wall, dust