Colby, at the head table, glanced up and answered, «I haven't seen her this morning. She must still be in her room.»
Richard wheeled and strode back the way he had come.
The guards tensed and reached for their tranquilizer pistols, but J signaled to them not to fire. Richard swept past them so quickly he almost knocked one of them over, then mounted the stairs three steps at a time. J, puffing and wheezing, followed him up.
Richard accosted an attendant who was coming down the hall outside Zoe's room. «Have you seen Mrs. Smythe-Evans?»
The man looked startled. «Why yes, I have.»
«In her room?»
«No, she came out just a few minutes ago.»
«Where did she go?»
«Down the back stairs, but it's certainly strange that you're asking me these things.»
Richard shot him a worried glance. «Strange? Why?»
«It was you she was with, Mr. Blade.»
Richard's smugness vanished, to be replaced with a sick apprehension. He brushed past the puzzled attendant and, breaking into a run, bounded down the back stairs. To the amazement of the kitchen staff, he sprinted past the stoves and refrigerators and burst through the screen door out onto the back porch.
Half-blinded by the sudden sunlight, he almost tripped and fell as he went down the steps, then paused, shading his eyes with his hands, searching the tennis courts and groves of pine and eucalyptus. No one was in sight.
«Damn,» he whispered.
Then he heard a familiar laugh in the distance, from the front yard. Her laugh!
As the guards appeared, red-faced from running, on the back porch, Richard was off again, rounding the corner of the mansion at a long-legged lope.
Now he was in the side yard, now in the front, now pounding past the lion statues and the flagpole, across the weed-cracked paving stones toward the wire-mesh fence, toward the front gate where he could see green-uniformed armed guards turning to look in his direction.
Then he saw Zoe.
She was nearly to the front gate, walking with a jaunty step, dressed in her borrowed white nurse's outfit, her back to him. At her side was a tall, muscular man in white slacks and T-shirt. Blade had no trouble recognizing the man.
«Myself,» Richard whispered. He thought, And yet not myself. The Ngaa!
Richard cupped his hands around his mouth as he ran and shouted, «Zoe! Zoe! Stop!»
She stopped, turned to look back over her shoulder. Her eyes widened.
«Zoe!» Richard called. «Don't go with him!»
She looked first at Richard, then at the man beside her, confused.
The man turned, smiling with Richard Blade's face, smiling triumphantly. His hand shot out and grasped Zoe by the wrist. She screamed and tried to pull away.
Desperately Richard put on a burst of speed.
He had almost reached them when, with a sharp bang like a pistol shot, they vanished.
Howling, anguished, Richard hurled himself full-length on the pavement where they'd been standing, clutching at the coarse weeds that thrust themselves up through the cracks.
The weeds were black and crumbly, as if they'd been burned, and the surface of the stone in that one area was so hot it hurt his fingers.
In the air he could smell, faintly but distinctly, the acrid stench of ozone.
Chapter 11
The three men sat in Dr. Colby's office. The room was no longer dim, as it was during therapeutic sessions, but flooded with morning sunlight. Richard sat on the couch, Dr. Colby nearby in his usual chair, and J behind the heavy darkstained desk.
Richard said, «What do you intend to do now, sir?» The question was addressed to J.
J sighed. «For the moment, nothing.»
Richard stood up to face him angrily. «Nothing?»
«Calm down, Richard,» the old man said soothingly. «We have our men combing the neighborhood, of course, but…»
«Your men? Is that all?» Richard advanced toward the desk. «What about the local authorities? The police? The FBI?»
«It's best we keep this to ourselves,» J said tonelessly. «Some word of it might get back to the Prime Minister…»
Richard's fist crashed down on the desk, leaving a crack in the veneer. «What are you saying, J? That you're planning on keeping this a secret from the Prime Minister? That you won't even call on Copra House for assistance?»
J templed his fingers. «That is essentially correct. You understand…»
Richard broke in, «Yes, I understand. Any sort of bad news might influence the Prime Minister to shut down the project.»
«Quite so,» J admitted.
A new thought flashed into Richard's mind. «Or is there more to it? J, have you told the PM about the Ngaa?»
«Well, as a matter of fact, no.» At last J's voice betrayed a hint of embarrassment.
Blade was angry. «I don't like this, J. I don't like it one damn bit.»
«I didn't expect you to like it, Richard. I did, however, expect you to listen to reason.» J looked up with troubled eyes at the giant looming over him. «Would it help, really, to broadcast our little problems all over the world? Think, my boy, think! Would all the police we could possibly summon find your Zoe if the Ngaa chose to keep her hidden?»
«Perhaps not.» Richard's broad shoulders slumped.
J leaned forward. «Dr. Colby and I believe the Ngaa and Zoe are somewhere in the neighborhood. Isn't that right, doctor?»
Colby agreed quickly, «Yes, sir. It is Richard the Ngaa is trying to influence. The Ngaa will stay close to Richard, and keep Mrs. Smythe-Evans with it.»
«Let me look for her,» said Blade. «Set me free and let me look for her.»
«That I cannot permit!» J spoke sharply. «You must stay here until the government examiners arrive, and then you must put on the most convincing performance of sanity for them that your mentality can conceive, and that's an order!»
Richard thought, We shall see about that.
«And not a word to them about the Ngaa,» J added. «Is that understood?»
«Yes, sir,» Richard responded.
J studied his face suspiciously. «You worry me more when you say yes than when you say no. You must realize that if we lose Zoe-and I don't think we will-she is one of us now. She's a soldier, like you and I, and expendable.»
«Expendable. Yes, sir.»
«So you will obey my orders?»
«To the letter, sir.»
«I hope you won't take this personally, but I'm going to lock you in your room until the examiners arrive. A routine precaution, since you've given me your word…»
«Of course, sir. If I were in your place, I wouldn't believe me either.»
Dr. Colby stifled a nervous laugh.
London and Berkeley have one thing in common: fog.
Berkeley's normal pattern was summer fog and winter rain, but the drought had made nonsense of normality and turned meteorology from a science into a gamble. The fog came now almost every night, though the season was all wrong for it, and instead of drifting in from the sea, it built up on cold windless evenings over the inland marshes east of the Berkeley hills, finally, in the frigid hours before dawn, spilling through the gaps in the coastal range to cascade in silent gray cataracts down upon the sleeping city and out toward the Golden Gate.
Richard lay on his bed, fully dressed and wide awake, watching the fog outside his window.
And snoring.
The snoring was for the benefit of J and whoever might be listening on the headphones down the hall. Was the fog thick enough yet? Yes. Soon it would start to thin again as the first rays of the morning sun burned it off.
The time to move was now.
Still snoring lustily, Richard rolled carefully out of bed and, on stocking feet, tiptoed to the door. He stopped snoring a second to listen, then proceeded to remove the hingepins from the hinges, first the top hinges, then the bottom.
He returned to his bed and picked up his pillowcase, from which the pillow had been removed. He put his tennis shoes in and lay down a moment, then rolled noisily, giving the impression to his listeners, he hoped, that he was turning onto his side.