How much time did I have? The food deliverers would be missed eventually. Before that, someone might stroll down the hallway and wonder why the guard wasn’t on duty in front of the safe-room door. But there wasn’t any way I was going to get out of this house and across the well-lit grounds and over the wall, not without being seen, and my height and hair color made it unlikely I could disguise myself as just another passing conspirator.
Well, if I couldn’t get out, maybe I could bring reinforcements in. The phone here was monitored, I knew that, but a quick call from one of the extensions — maybe upstairs — should do the job. With one last look at the patient sentries on their folding chairs, I turned away and hurried back down the hallway, past my former prison, and on up the wide doubling-back stairs.
I’d never been up here before. As with downstairs, a broad carpeted hallway ran the width of the house, but up here there were more doors, a few open, most closed. For no particular reason I chose to turn right — toward the front door, that would be, downstairs — and passed one shut door before coming to an opening on my right which, when I peered cautiously in, turned out to be Ross’s office.
Why not? I went in, closing the door behind me. As with the other rooms I’d seen, this one was well-lit, from a fluorescent lamp on the desk and a glass-shaded floor lamp over by the black leather reading chair and a pair of ceiling spots aimed at a giant six-foot-square acrylic painting of tumbled gray boulders.
Crossing the room, I went around behind the desk and, before seating myself, glanced out the window. There was the rear of the house, the dirt-filled pool very obvious now with the exterior lights on. There was the expected guard, seated at a white wrought-iron chair on the patio, his ugly little machine pistol on the white round table beside him, looking like some obscure tool in the plumbing trade.
The pool-company van was gone.
From this angle I could see the right rear corner of the garage, and the space behind it where the van had been. That area was mostly in shadow now, but out a ways it seemed to me I could see faint indentations of tire tracks in the shaggy lawn, out beyond the pool, angling out away from the house.
I knew, from previous visits here, that the stone wall at the front and sides of this property gave way to a high chain link fence at the back, topped with a spiral of razor wire, the whole thing artfully overgrown with vines and shrubbery. To make a new entrance in a stone wall would be time-consuming and difficult, but to make a new entrance through vines and a chain link fence required only wire cutters. And out there somewhere was Al-Gazel.
I turned to the desk, which was a more elaborate version of Ross’s complex miniature habitat out in Malibu. There was the phone. There was the digital clock, reading 11:04, switching to 11:05 as I looked at it. There were the keyboard, the monitor screen, the printer, and there was the drawer of floppy discs. There was more neatness in this office than in Malibu, the vast scumble of research materials having been forced back to the outer suburbs of the desk, leaving only one pale blue manila folder centered in the main work area, just to the left of the word processor’s keyboard.
I sat down. The phone, tan in color, was part of a minor switchboard operation, with several incoming lines and an in-house intercom; all in all, a more elaborate setup than mine at home. The push buttons were in the receiver, between the ear and mouthpieces, but when I picked the phone up and put it to my ear — a green light showed on the panel — there was no dial tone.
They’ve turned it off? Just at night, that would have to be. By day they would need the phone working so Ross could continue to create the appearance of normality here, but at night they could switch it off, protecting themselves, just in case Ross or Doreen had a change of heart or, more remotely, in case I broke out of my prison.
How much longer would they need Ross and, by extension, Doreen and me? They would be setting up tonight, and I had no doubt they’d figured out a way to neutralize those microwave barriers, so after their preparations were complete they would still be undetected. In the morning there would probably be very heavy security throughout this entire area, with the police possibly doing telephone checks and even random checks in person of the houses all around here. Then there would be the explosion.
They’d want to still be here for that, wouldn’t they? Partly to see the results of their labors, but mostly because remote-control gizmos can fail, and they would want to be sure, after all their work. So they would be here at the time of the explosion, this army of people — how many? a dozen? two dozen? — and for some time after all the dynamite blew it would not be possible for them to leave here and try driving away from this part of town. The police presence after the explosion would be intense, and Ross would still have the job of front man, sounding chipper and normal on the phone, being friendly but firmly aware of his householder’s rights if any lawmen actually came to his gate.
(Would Deputy Ken be back at Ross’s gate, seeing the connection, more insistent than last time? It would be too late for Al-Gazel by then, and all the people in it, even if he did come back, and Ross, the plausible middle-class householder in this affluent neighborhood, would probably still be able to stall and stall and hold off police interference until he’d managed to get us all killed.)
So it would go on until tomorrow night, probably, when under cover of darkness the Barq group could leave, either openly through the front gate or, if the police were showing too much interest outside, surreptitiously through neighboring yards and houses. Just twenty-four hours from now, maybe a little more, and Ross’s partnership with Barq would be over, closed out with bullets in three heads. A great relief to those boys, no doubt, not to have to play the game anymore, not to have to go along with Ross’s stupid demands, not to have to accommodate his girlfriend and his actor pal. And then, a few hours later, away the whole company would go, free and clear.
I need my own army, I thought. But how? I couldn’t get out of the house, and the phone would stay dead until it no longer mattered.
Looking around, I noticed again the blue folder centered on the desk. It was pale blue, and a white label had been pasted to it, with a title:
Ross’s file. Ross’s file on this. I reached out and opened the folder.
46
It was dedicated — I still find this hard to believe — it was dedicated to Doreen and me. This is what was typed on the first sheet of paper I came to inside the folder:
For Doreen Kaufman and Sam Holt,
who put up with a lot—
I hope they think it was worth it.
Insane. The man was completely involved in the fantasy.
But still a professional, I saw, as I turned beyond the dedication page. The material in the folder consisted of three sorts of things: First, variant outlines of the book, with notes for treatment and viewpoint and why thus-and-so should go before this-and-that. Second, rough first draft segments, none more than a few pages long, of specific moments in the story, such as the first time he saw the Delia West tape and the first time he met with the Barq people. Third, extensive notes on the conspiracy itself.
Barq, it turned out, was actually who they were. Their organization’s precise name was Barq Cyrenica, which Ross translated as “Cyrenician lightning,” explaining that Cyrenica — or, more usually, Cyrenaica — was an ancient coastal North African region around the once-important port city of Cyrene, variously a part of the Egyptian and Roman empires, and now, with Tripolitania and Fezzanya, one of the three segments of Libya. Barq Cyrenica was a rogue fundamentalist Islamic sect, at times pledging itself to the Iranian ayatollahs or to Libya’s Colonel Qadhafi. It had been held responsible for several murders of Arab emigres in Europe, but this was apparently its first operation in the United States.