“Who could that be?” Mandy asked, moving toward the companionway.
Seth shrugged. “The guy from the other boat, probably.”
The voices grew louder. They heard snatches of conversation, their father’s voice as he strode angrily past the hatch: “…trouble… get up… not what police should… you think I’m going to… then…”
“I’m going to see who it is!” Mandy whispered.
“Some politico,” he said, using a term they applied to most of their father’s newest associates. “Can’t you tell? Dad’s making a speech to him.”
“At midnight?”
“They bug him at all hours. Stay put.”
They both listened, but the men seemed to have stopped talking.
“I’m going to go see,” she said. She was up the companionway before he could stop her. The men were still quiet, so he thought Mandy was too late anyway — the other man had probably left. He squirted some toilet bowl cleaner into the bowl and began to scrub — let Mandy get in trouble for not working.
He heard a loud thud and wondered if his dumb sister had tripped. He listened and could hear quick footsteps — too heavy to be Amanda’s. His dad running? He thought he heard her yelp. He stepped out of the head, listened. Hell, maybe she did fall.
He started toward the companionway just as she came stumbling down the ladder. Her face was white, and she was clutching her throat. A bright red wash of blood covered her hands, her arms, the entire front of her body.
“Mandy!”
Her eyes were wide and terrified, pleading with him. Her mouth formed some unspoken word just before she collapsed in a heap at the foot of the ladder. As she fell, her hand came away from her throat, and he was sprayed with her warm blood.
“Mandy!” he screamed.
There was a cut on her neck — blood continued to spray from it in smaller and smaller spurts.
“Dad!” he yelled. “Dad! Help!”
He heard hurried steps and looked up, expecting to see his father.
A pirate stood at the top of the ladder.
The man who looked down at him was wearing a black eye patch over his left eye and carried a glinting piece of steel — though it was a small knife, not a cutlass — and the man’s dark clothes were modern.
Seth turned and ran in blind panic toward the bow. But there was no escape except through the hatch, and no shelter — except the small head. He dodged into it, turning to close the door on his attacker just as the knife came slashing. He raised his hands in defense, and the knife cut across his fingers. Screaming in pain, he whirled and threw his back against the door, catching the attacker’s arm. The attacker shoved hard, moving one step in. Seth ground his heel into the man’s foot. The man gave a grunt of pain and pulled the foot back even as he slashed with the knife, cutting across the front of Seth’s neck. Only as he reached up with bloodied hands to cover the wound did Seth catch his own reflection in the mirror. Realizing that this was how the man had aimed the blow, Seth jammed his shoulder against the man’s arm, pinning it to the wall, then hit the light switch. He felt dizzy, but forced himself to stay on his feet. With a fumbling grasp, he used his less injured left hand to pick up the open plastic bottle of toilet bowl cleaner on the sink counter. He put it up to where the man’s good eye was peering in — and squeezed the plastic bottle between the wall and his palm.
He didn’t think any of the chemical had hit the man — who must have seen it coming, because he jerked back, cutting Seth’s shoulder as he pulled the knife arm from beneath him. Free of this obstruction, the door slammed shut and Seth’s weight held it closed. Seth dropped the cleaner even as he struggled with the lock, his fingers slippery and barely functioning. He managed to grab a towel, to hold it against his neck, but soon he could not stand. The pain was intense, and he felt himself weakening, his own blood warm and sticky and dampening his shirt. He wedged himself between the hull and the door, even as the attacker began slamming against it.
The door shook beneath the blows. It would give, Seth thought. He tried to yell, but found he couldn’t make a sound.
The pounding stopped. The small room swam before him. Seth bent forward, trying to fight the feeling of faintness. No sooner had he moved than the wood where he had rested his head splintered inward with a bang — split by a small ax. The attacker must have taken it from their camping gear. The man yanked the ax from the wood. Seth tried to drag himself away from the door before the second blow came, but found he could not. He brought his hands back to the towel at his throat, wondering if the ax’s third blow would slice into his back.
Suddenly, he heard music — not music, really, but a short series of tones, a repetitive, insistent, three-note call — the sound of a pager or of an alarm on an electronic watch.
Do-re-mi-do-re-mi-do-re —
Seth heard the sound cut off. He waited, every muscle tense, for the ax to strike again — but the third blow never came.
Over the next few minutes, Seth drifted in and out of awareness, but a low rumbling made him open his eyes. The other boat was leaving.
He began to feel cold and sleepy. He must get up and help Mandy now, he thought, but in his pain and light-headed confusion, he could not locate the door latch. Still holding the towel against his neck, he groped along the wall with one hand and managed to turn on the light. He found the latch just as he lost consciousness.
2
Monday, June 4, 1:56 A.M.
Las Piernas
Wearing rubber gloves, the Looking Glass Man checked all the blinds. On a less eventful evening, this last night of using this apartment would have filled him with a sense of regret. It was so perfectly suited to his needs — at the back of the building, over the carport, where no one would notice his footsteps across the floor late in the evening. The woman in the only adjoining apartment worked the graveyard shift. Still, he moved quietly.
The old television set was off; he had never watched it. The stove was clean but cold; he had never cooked on it. The meager, outdated furnishings in the apartment bore the marks of previous owners and tenants. The next tenant would not see any sign of his use of it. There was nothing he was so careful of as where he left signs of his presence.
He evenly sprayed disinfectant over the surface of the gray Formica table-top, then wiped it with a white paper towel, moving his gloved hand in controlled, overlapping circles. He placed the towel in a white plastic bag.
When he was certain the surface of the table was dry, he took out a notebook with a stiff, cardboard cover. It was the sort of notebook one could find in any college bookstore, a black-and-white-marbled cover binding graph paper, used by science students to record experiments.
Inside, on the first page, he had written a quotation:
“God is in the details.”
The quotation was from a famous architect — Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had designed the Seagram Building in New York. The Looking Glass Man considered himself to be a kind of architect, too. When he had started the first of these notebooks, at the age of sixteen, the entries had been so benign — nothing more than recorded observations of little social experiments, his attempts to monitor the reactions of others to certain stimuli. But even then, perhaps intuitively, he had placed the quotation on the first page of the notebook. He now had many of these notebooks and had written this same quotation at the front of all of them. His faith in the importance of details was unshakable.
He turned to a blank page, and using a mechanical pencil, began to record data in block letters. Each letter took up one square of the graph paper’s grid, the tip of the pencil lead never crossing a blue line. He wrote a heading, ANTI-INTERFERENCE, then noted the date and time for a series of events, from the time he boarded the fishing vessel Cygnet until the time he left it. It was difficult not to rush ahead to the most exciting minutes, those few spent on the yacht, the Amanda. He forced himself to work in a precise manner, recounting every one of the God-laden details in chronological order.