Roma shook his head. "These are merely complications. We will go ahead as planned. The second and final delivery is tonight."
"But we haven't located the first yet!"
"Then you must keep searching, Mauricio. Find that device!"
The elevator doors opened, admitting a young couple. Roma was glad of that. He knew Mauricio had more to say but he didn't want to hear it. All he needed was another twenty-four hours, and he would be able to fulfill his destiny.
7
"Look at your scars," Gia said, tracing her fingers across his chest. 'They're all inflamed."
Jack leaned against the tile wall of the shower stall with closed eyes. An hour of vigorous lovemaking had left him with partially vulcanized knees. The steam from the hot water was easing him into a pleasantly tranquil state of paralysis.
He opened his eyes and watched the water course over Gia's pale, lithe body as she leaned against him. The flow had molded her short blond hair against her scalp. He reveled in the soft feel of her.
The bathroom was old-fashioned white tile with time-darkened grout. But the enclosed shower was relatively new and roomy.
At Jack's urging, Gia and Vicky had moved into the Westphalen townhouse on Sutton Square. It was unofficially Vicky's anyway—she was listed in her aunts' will as the final heir. She'd be the legal owner when Grace and Nellie Westphalen were declared officially dead, but just when that would happen—their bodies never would be found—was anyone's guess. Since there was no one to object to Gia and Vicky living in the place and keeping it up, they'd done just that.
With what seemed like enormous effort, Jack looked down at the three red lines running diagonally across his chest, starting near his left shoulder and ending at the lower border of his right ribs.
The scene strobed through his mind as if it had been yesterday. Battery Park…Kusum's ship burning in the harbor…the scar-lipped rakosh closing in on Gia and Vicky…Jack clinging to its back, trying to blind it…the creature peeling him off and slashing at him…the talons of its three-fingered hand raking fire across his chest…
"Not all the scars," he said. "Just the ones made by that rakosh."
"Funny. They weren't red last time we made love."
"Yeah, well, they've been kind of itchy lately." At least he assumed they were the source of that itching out in Monroe the other day. "I dreamed about the rakoshi again last night."
"Again? Bad?"
He nodded, thinking: Please don't ask if you were in it.
Instead, she touched the scars again. "I'm hoping the whole thing will eventually seem like just a bad dream. But you'll always have these as reminders."
"I like to think of them as proof that we really did run up against those things."
"Who wants proof?" Gia said, snuggling tighter against him. "I want to forget them—forget they ever existed."
"But they were real, right? We didn't just imagine them."
She stared at him. "Are you serious? Of course they were real. How can you even ask?"
"Because of the people I've been hanging with at the conference. UFOs and aliens and Antichrists are real to them. If one of them said to a friend, 'Are the gray aliens real?' he'd get the same look you gave me just now, and the friend would say, 'Are you serious? Of course they're real. How can you even ask?' You see what I'm getting at? These people are absolutely sure these conspiracies, these beings, these secret organizations are real."
"Shared delusions," Gia said with a slow nod. She began soaping his chest, hiding the scars with lather. "I see what you mean."
"To me, they're nut cases. I mean, talk to any one of them for five minutes and you know that someone has stopped payment on their reality check. But what if you and I went around talking about the rakoshi? Wouldn't people think the same about us? And with good reason—because we can't prove a damn thing. We have no hard evidence except these scars of mine which, as far as anybody knows, could have been self-inflicted."
"It happened, Jack. We lived through it—just barely—so we know."
"But do we? What do we know of reality but what we remember? When it comes right down to it, who we are is what we remember. And from what I've read about memory lately, it isn't all that reliable."
"Stop talking like this. You're scaring me."
"I'm scaring me."
"At least we're not out there saying rakoshi are planning to take over the world, or responsible for everything bad that happens."
"No…not yet."
"Now cut that out," she said, landing a gentle punch on the chest. "We're different from them because we're not focusing on it. That awful experience happened, we've dealt with it, and we've put it behind us—believe me, I'm doing my best to forget it. But they make it the center of their lives; they extrapolate it into a worldview."
"Yeah. Why would anybody want to do that? Isn't reality complicated enough?"
"Maybe that's the problem," Gia said. "Most of the time I find reality too complicated. Something happens because of this, something else happens because of that, another thing happens because of a combination of this, that, and the other thing."
"And lots of times," Jack added, "things seem to happen for no damn reason at all."
"Exactly. But an all-encompassing conspiracy simplifies all of that. You don't have to wonder any more. You don't have to fit the pieces together—you've got it all figured out already. Everyone else might be in the dark, but you know the real skinny."
"Come to think of it, a lot of those SESOUPers do look kind of smug." Jack sighed. "But in spite of everything you've said, some of them almost remind me of…me."
"Get out."
"I'm serious. Consider: They're always looking over their shoulders, I'm always looking over mine."
"With good reason."
"Let me finish. They tend to be loners; until I met you, I was a loner—big time. They're outsiders, I'm an outsider."
"Way outside."
"They're considered weirdoes by mainstream society, I'll land in the joint if mainstream society ever finds out about me. Really, despite the fact that I'm keeping my mouth shut, how do I know I'm not just like them, or"—he held up his thumb and forefinger, a quarter inch apart "this far" from being one of them?"
"Because I say you're not," Gia said, then kissed him.
If only that was enough, he thought, closing his eyes and holding her tight against him, needing her warmth, her presence, her very existence. Gia was his anchor to reality, to sanity. Without her and Vicky, who knew what wild shore he might be sailing toward.
He glanced down once more at the reddened diagonal streaks of his scars and suddenly the image of Roma was before him, from the cocktail party last night, his three middle fingers hooked into rakoshi-like talons, raking the air between them along the exact angle of Jack's scars.
"What's wrong?" Gia said as Jack's spine stiffened reflexively.
"Nothing," he told her. "Muscle spasm."
He held her tighter to keep her from seeing his expression, knowing it would give away his shock, his bafflement.
Did Roma know? What had he said? How easily we forget. But Jack had not forgotten. And no way Roma could know.
Then why make that weird three-pronged gesture, at just the right angle? Jack could think of no other way to interpret it. Roma knows. But how?
Jack had no idea, but he intended to find out.
But if Roma knew about the rakoshi scars, did he also know about Gia and Vicky? Could he have followed Jack here?