This was bad. Terrible. The worst.
Dan had known that time was running out, but he hadn't known that it was pouring away like floodwater through the broken breast of a damn. He had thought that at least five of the conspirators from the gray room remained to be disposed of before It would turn its attention to Melanie. He had figured those executions would require another day or two and, long before the last of the conspirators had been destroyed, he would have confirmed his suspicions about the case and would have found a way to bring the slaughter to an end in time to save Melanie. He'd thought he might even be in time to save one or more of those manipulative and amoral men, although they didn't deserve to be saved. But suddenly his chances of saving anyone were diminished: Three more were gone. As far as he knew, two conspirators remained: Albert Uhlander, the author; and Palmer Boothe. As soon as they were terminated, It would turn to Melanie with a special rage. It would tear her apart. It would hammer her head to bits, hammer the last glimmer of life out of her brain before finally releasing her. Only Boothe and Uhlander stood between the girl and death. And even now, either the publisher or the author — or both — might be in the merciless grip of their invisible but powerful adversary.
Dan turned away from Seames, jerked open the door, and plunged out into the parking lot, where a cold wind and a stinging rain and an early fog were industriously putting the lie to the standard postcard image of Southern California. He sloshed through several puddles, getting water in his shoes.
He heard Seames shouting at him, but he didn't pause or reply. When he got in the car, dripping and shivering, he looked back and saw Seames standing in the open door of the precinct house. From this distance the agent's face seemed to have aged in the past few minutes; now it was more in harmony with his gray hair.
Driving out of the lot, into the street, Dan was surprised that Seames let him go. After all, a great deal was at stake, perhaps even grave national-defense issues; eight people were dead, and the FBI had officially stepped into the case. Seames would have been justified in detaining him; in fact, it was a dereliction of duty not to have done so.
Dan was relieved to be free, of course, because it was more important than ever that he talk to Boothe soon, damned soon. If Melanie's life had been hanging by a string, it was now hanging by a thread, and time like a razor was relentlessly sawing through that fragile filament.
Delmar, Carrie, Cindy Lakey…
No.
Not this time.
He would save this woman, this child. He would not fail again.
He drove through Westwood, reached Wilshire, swung left, heading toward Westwood Boulevard, which would take him to Sunset and to the entrance to Bel Air. He would be arriving at the Boothe house ahead of schedule, but maybe Boothe would be early too.
Dan went three blocks before it dawned on him that Michael Seames had probably had his car bugged while he was in the precinct house preparing his statement against Wexlersh and Manuello. That was why he hadn't been detained for questioning or arrested for obstructing a federal officer. Seames had realised that the quickest method of finding Laura and Melanie McCaffrey was to allow Dan to lead the way.
As a traffic light turned red ahead of him, Dan braked and glanced repeatedly in the rearview mirror. Traffic was heavy. Spotting a tail would be difficult and time-consuming when there was precious little time to consume. Besides, those tracking him were not necessarily within sight of his car; if they had bugged his car, if they were running an electronic tail, they could be several blocks away, watching his progress on a lighted scope overlaid with a computer-generated map of the streets.
He had to lose them.
He wasn't going to the McCaffrey's yet, but he didn't want to be followed to Boothe's place, either. A tag-along band of FBI agents would not particularly encourage Boothe to open up. Furthermore, if Boothe did spill everything he knew, Dan didn't want anyone to hear what the publisher had to say, for if Melanie did — by some miracle — survive, that information would be used against her. Then she would have no chance whatsoever of finding her way back from autism, no hope of leading a normal life.
Already, there was little hope for her, though there was at least a spark. Right now, it was Dan's job to preserve that spark of hope and try to nurture it into a flame.
The traffic light changed to green.
He hesitated, not sure which way to go, what action to take in order to rid himself of his tail.
He looked at his watch.
His heart was pounding.
The soft ticking of his watch, the thump-tick of his heartbeat, and the ticking of the rain on the car all blended together in one metronomic sound, and it seemed as though the entire world were a time bomb about to explode.
Melanie's eyes followed the action on the screen. She didn't make a sound, and she didn't shift an inch in her seat, but her eyes moved, and that seemed to be a good sign. It was one of the few times in the past two days that Laura had seen the girl actually looking at something in this world. For almost an hour, the movement of her eyes had indicated that she was involved with the movie, which was certainly the first that she had focused on external events for any substantial length of time. Whether Melanie was following the plot or was merely fascinated by the bright images didn't matter. The important thing was that the music and the color and Spielberg's cinematic artistry — his imaginative scenes and archetypal characters and bold use of the camera — had done what nothing else could do, had begun to draw the child out of her self-imposed psychological exile.
Laura knew there would be no miraculous recovery, no spontaneous rejection of autism simply because of the movie. But it was a start, however small.
In the meantime, Melanie's interest in the film made it easier for Laura to monitor her and keep her awake. The girl exhibited no signs of being sleepy or of slipping back into a more profound catatonic state.
* * *
Dan drove back and forth through Westwood, winding from street to street. Each time that he came to a stop sign or a red traffic light, he shifted the car into Park, got out, and hastily searched one small portion of the sedan's body for the compact transmitter that he knew must be attached to some part of the vehicle. He could have pulled to the curb and examined the entire car methodically from end to end, but then the Bureau agents tailing him would catch up and see what he was doing. If they realized that he suspected being monitored they would not give him an opportunity to find and discard the bug and slip away from them; they would most likely arrest him and take him back to Michael Seames. So at the first stop sign, he frantically checked up under the left front fender and in the wheel well around the tire, groping for a magnetically attached electronics package about the size of a pack of cigarettes. At the next stop he checked the left rear wheel well; during the two stops after that, he ran to the right side of the car and explored under those fenders. He knew other motorists were gawking, but because of his zigzagging route of randomly chosen streets, none of them were behind him for more than two stops, so none had enough time to begin to think that his behavior was suspicious rather than merely odd or eccentric.
Eventually, at a stop sign at an intersection in a residential neighborhood, two blocks east of Hilgarde and south of Sunset Boulevard, when he was the only motorist in sight, with rain pasting his hair even tighter to his scalp and drizzling under the collar of his coat, he found what he was looking for under the rear bumper. He tore it loose, pitched it into a line of plum-thorn shrubs in the front yard of a big pale-yellow Spanish house, got behind the wheel of the sedan again, slammed his door, and got the hell out of there. He repeatedly checked the rearview mirror during the next few blocks, afraid that the men tailing him had gotten close enough to see him discard the bug and were following visually. But he was not pursued.