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The room was silent again.

Dilbeck picked up his folder.

He went out into the corridor. It was a close-run thing. For a time there they had really wanted his head; only the congressman had brought the situation around. Momentarily, he felt a conspiratorial affection for Leach.

It was midafternoon, mountain time, when the plane carrying Thorne arrived in Phoenix at Sky Harbor Airport. There was a bloody-looking sun in the sky, a strange coppery tint to the air, a slight wind blowing through the palms. Inside the terminal he went to the Avis desk for his car rental; the girl led him outside to a Pinto and handed him the keys. He drove out of the airport to the nearest gasoline station, where he obtained a map of Arizona. Next, he went to a shopping plaza and in a department store purchased a dark three-piece suit, a pair of black shoes, a white shirt, a conservative tie that was black with pale-gray stripes. He used his credit card, expecting all the while that the salesman would refuse to accept it. A touch of deeply rooted paranoia, Thorne thought. He had felt it even inside the changing rooms when he had been trying the new clothes on and had looked at the door handle almost as if he expected to see it being turned. A clear mind, he thought. Clarity. Calm.

He sat down in his new clothes at the cafeteria in the department store and drank coffee, studying his map. Two hours, he reckoned. Two hours to Escalante. He took his wallet out of his pocket. He looked at his security clearance pass, which was stamped
WHITE HOUSE PERSONNEL
. Did it still have any power? Was it still useful? He looked at the photograph of himself and he was seeing a younger man, the light of some optimism in the eyes, a firmness to the mold of the jaw: a face of some strength or what, more quaintly, was called character. He didn't look like this anymore. He put the pass back into the wallet and realized that he was both nervous and afraid; that the lines between these sensations had blurred to the point where there wasn't a difference. Calm, he said to himself again. You can only pull this off with some kind of cool, an impertinence, a quality he wasn't sure he had in any abundance.

He walked outside to the Pinto.
No green Catalinas
, he thought. Not now. He drove, following the map, in the direction of Interstate 17, then he took the turning for Highway 60. He was traveling in a northwesterly direction out of the city. The midafternoon traffic was heavy. The highway, burned by the unexpectedly strong sun, shimmered in front of his eyes. The buildings of downtown Phoenix went past, a scattering of skyscrapers in the desert. He could see through a haze the mountains to the north, ragged, lunar, like a landscape you might encounter only in some dream of alienation. There were great pockets of shadows, like caves, in the sides of the mountains. He drove past ramshackle collections of trailer parks, shantytowns that existed under the shadow of the highway, boxcars stationary on railroad sidings, scattered factories, brand-new industrial estates. They had taken the desert and turned it into another form of wilderness. Marcia, he thought; what would she have had to say about all this? The ecological substructure was being, quite simply, ripped away.

Marcia.

He glanced in the mirror. It had become habit. A truck was in behind him in the slow lane. He saw the driver's face in silhouette.

Then the urban sprawl yielded to a few sparse dwellings, a small township, a hamlet, and finally to the desert itself. It was strange: he had the feeling that he had stepped out of a bleak Eastern spring into the riot of summer all in one day. He saw the saguaros, monsters beyond the highway; he saw rocks and rubble and cholla as if they had been deliberately placed in position centuries ago by some divine act, a cosmic hand, and had not been changed since. Everything cast long shadows.

Towns came and went as he drove.

Wittman, Morristown, Wickenburg. They passed, seeming little more than traffic signals and a few dwellings with a temporary look to them. He had the unsettling sensation that one day the desert would finally take back everything that had been wrested from it. It was a feeling that suggested violence, some implicit force. An earthquake, a drought, a cataclysm of some kind—and then there would be only desert and nothing else.

To the west there were mountains which, according to his map, were known as the Vulture Mountains. He imagined gulleys, and dry washes containing bleached bones, birds of prey moving in the cool of shadow and silences, great quiet wings drifting.

Birds of prey, he thought.

The birds of Escalante.

He squinted into the weakening light of the sun.

Before dark, he thought. I want to be there before night comes.

3

Sharpe took Drucker's call, listened to the man a moment, and then said: “What's it supposed to mean?”

“I only pass on the messages,” Drucker said.

“It sounds like a code, doesn't it?”

“I only pass on the messages,” Drucker said again.

“Let me write the goddamn thing down.” Sharpe took out his pen and asked Drucker to repeat the words.

Drucker did so.

Sharpe stared at the words for a while, willing them to yield some kind of sense. When he had tried to stoke his tired brain into activity, when the message seemed finally meaningless, he picked up his receiver and dialed Dilbeck's number.

Dilbeck said: “Unless this is important, Sharpe, I don't want to know. I just had a hard time with my colleagues concerning our Flying Dutchman and—”

Sharpe cut in: “We intercepted a telegram that was sent to Thorne's girl.”

“Telegrams aren't uncommon,” Dilbeck said, a yawn in his voice.

“This one's weird,” Sharpe said. “I'll read it to you.”

Sharpe read it. There was a short silence.

“It came out of Dallas,” Sharpe said.

“Dallas?”

“Fourteen hundred central time.”

Sharpe could hear the sound of a pencil or pen being tapped on a wooden surface.

“Thorne's dead, isn't he?” Dilbeck asked finally.

“Yes,” Sharpe said.

“I'll be in touch.”

Sharpe listened to the cut in the line.
Thorne's dead
. Why did that have such an ominous sound? He rested his face in the palms of his hands, thinking of Thorne, of Drucker in the field—Drucker who was one of the best interceptive technicians Tech Serv had ever had, Drucker who was so far to the right of the spectrum that he thought the senator from Wisconsin America's only twentieth-century saint—he thought until everything became something of a congealed jumble in his mind. Failure had such an empty ring to it, like the sound of a hollow silver dollar falling on wood.

The afternoon sun was going down and hung low now in the western desert. It was a flare finally burning out. On the edge of Escalante, he slowed the Pinto. It was barely a town; he passed a bar called Lucky's a hardware store, a grocery, a few scattered houses, a couple of trailers with TV antennae appended to them. A girl on a swing watched him pass. She raised her hand in a quick shy greeting, smiled, then let the hand fall. Thorne drove through the place. There were a couple of jets in the darkening sky, hardly more than points of red light from which scarlet vapor trails hung in various stages of disintegration. Smoke signals, Thorne thought. He stopped the car, spread his map out on the seat, ran his finger over the name of Escalante. Six, seven miles out into the desert there was the mapmaker's symbol for a military reservation, a curious red hieroglyph. A military reservation: it could cover a multitude of sins. He drove the Pinto off the road and into the desert, stopped once more in the kind of terrain this small car hadn't been engineered to withstand, and consulted the map again. Six miles maybe. He drove on slowly, avoiding rocks, pitfalls, while the suspension system of the car whined underneath him.

The landscape became more hostile.

He had to steer the car upward through a dry wash and push it in second gear over a slope that was crumbling beneath the tires. It was no place in which to be stuck. He made it over the incline and then went cautiously down the other side. The Pinto stalled, he started it again, it stalled a second time. He switched the ignition off and sat for a time looking through his window and thought: You're a couple of miles from a road, from the threads that link one fraction of the civilized world with another, and suddenly everything's different. The sun was dropping behind the mountains. He turned the key in the ignition, the car started, and he maneuvered it the rest of the way down the slope. At the bottom there was a path of sorts. He could see tire treads in the scrub, flattened cholla, and—as he turned the car onto the path—a sign that said:
U.S. MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT: ESCALANTE BOMBING & GUNNERY RANGE. UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL FORBIDDEN BEYOND THIS POINT.
Bombing and gunnery, he thought; and something else besides. He drove on past the sign.

He had the car at ten miles an hour. The path was rutted and broken, crumbling and dry, and some kind of irrigation ditch ran on either side of it. They might be waiting for me, he thought. They might be expecting me.

Unless.

Unless I'm already dead.

Not only unauthorized, but dead into the bargain.

He passed coils of barbed wire and a second sign that repeated the first. Waiting, he thought. Waiting for me to show.

Then what?

Then he knew the answer to that very well.

Dilbeck saw her come out of the building, walk down the steps, and cross a stretch of grass. He got out of his car and went toward her. Lovely girl, he thought. The long black hair, the knowing look in the eyes, a perfect mouth. She walked with a long stride, self-assured, comfortable with herself, even slightly arrogant.

He intercepted her. When she saw him the expression on her face became one of fear, her eyes turned cold and distant, her skin suddenly pale.

“Miss Emerson?” He took off his soft hat and held it an inch above his skull.

She stopped, saying nothing.

“I hate to interrupt you,” he said. He watched her put her hands in the pockets of her black velvet pants. There was a book beneath her arm; the title had the word
Lamp
in it, he couldn't see the rest of it.

“Well, you
are
interrupting me,” she said.

He put his hat back on. He smiled at her.

“Look, I don't think I've got anything very much to say to you, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is—”

She turned and began to move away.

He put out his hand, gripped her by the arm.

“That hurts,” she said.

“I am sorry,” he said. Such a lovely girl, he thought. Perhaps it would have been better all around to have had her killed. Perhaps. “You see, the gravity of this particular situation shouldn't be underestimated, Miss Emerson.”

“Let go of my arm, okay?”

He took his hand away. “I think perhaps you don't see the seriousness very clearly. A matter of national security is involved—”

“What else?” she said.

“Don't make it tough on me.” He watched a group of students come from a building, walking slowly, books beneath their arms, walking with the casual detachment of the young; so sure, so very sure of themselves.

“Okay,” she said. “Suppose you tell me what you want?”

“I wonder if you've heard from John Thorne.”

“Do you think I'd tell you if I had?”

The defiance of it; Dilbeck felt a slight glow of approval about her. He liked her spirit.

“I doubt it,” he said. “I would hope so, but I doubt it. Do you know where he is?”

She smiled, her confidence apparently growing.

He let her savor her moment and then he said: “Why does Thorne call himself the Philistine?”

She crumpled, momentarily she looked as if she had been struck, but she recovered with the composure of an actress. “You're mistaken,” she said, her voice a little hoarse.

“Let's not beat about the bush,” he said. “You know and I know that he sent you a telegram from Dallas today. We read it probably before you did, Miss Emerson. Let's not beat about the bush, eh?”

She was silent. She bit her lower lip hard. Fine, large white teeth.

“Why does he call himself the Philistine?”

She looked up at the sky, blinking against the light, and then she stared down at the ground. Dilbeck watched her.

She said nothing.

He looked at his wristwatch. Then he said, “Well. I think you've told me what I need to know.”

“How? I haven't told you a damn thing!”

“Just by your reaction, Miss Emerson. That's all. You see, I wasn't sure it was from Thorne before, but I'm pretty sure now. Thank you.”

She permitted a small flicker of anger to alter her features. It lasted a moment, then passed. “Pig,” she said. “Pig.”

“The Philistine,” Dilbeck said. “It's an intriguing nickname. If we had more time then maybe you could explain the reason for it to me.”

He raised his hat once more.

“Goodbye.”

He walked in the direction of his car, conscious of her standing motionless, motionless and shocked, behind him.

He got inside his car, saw her image reflected in the mirror, then drove away. He drove until he came to a callbox, went inside, dialed Sharpe's priority number.

“One of your people has fucked up again,” he said. “Thorne is still alive.”

Sharpe was silent for a long time.

Dilbeck said, “I want you to pull out all the stops, Sharpe. Understand? I want every available item of information analyzed. I want you to follow through on the fact that we know he was in Dallas. And I want you to work on the assumption that he is on his way to Phoenix. Have you got that?”

“Yes,” Sharpe said quietly.

Dilbeck hung up. He yawned, seeing his own image in the mirror inside the box. His bones, even his bones, felt weary, as if in the hollow cylinders of his skeleton the marrow were beginning to melt.