Dark Rivers of the Heart (63 page)

As she drew close to the Bronco, she saw a tripod with a camera on it. Related gear was spread across the lowered tailgate.

The photographer, bearded and furious, was spouting steam from his nostrils as if about to explode. “You ruined my shot. That pristine swath of snow curving up to that thrusting, fiery rock. Such contrast, such drama. And now
ruined.
”

She glanced back at the rock formations beyond the helicopter. They were still fiery, a luminous stained-glass red in the beams of the westering sun, and they were still thrusting. But he was right about the snow: It wasn’t pristine any longer.

“Sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” he said sharply.

She studied the snow in the vicinity of the Bronco. As far as she could tell, his were the only footprints in it. He was alone.

“What the hell are you doing out here anyway?” the photographer demanded. “There are sound restrictions here, nothing as noisy as that allowed. This is a wildlife preserve.”

“Then cooperate and preserve your own,” she said, drawing the SIG 9mm from under her leather jacket.

In the JetRanger again, while Ellie held the pistol and the Micro Uzi, Spencer cut strips out of the upholstery. He used those lengths of leather to bind the wrists of each of the three men to the arms of the passenger seats in which he’d made them sit.

“I won’t gag you,” he told them. “Nobody’s likely to hear you shouting anyway.”

“We’ll freeze to death,” the pilot fretted.

“You’ll work your arms loose in half an hour at most. Another half an hour or forty-five minutes to walk out to the highway we crossed over when we flew in. Not nearly enough time to freeze.”

“Just to be safe,” Ellie assured them, “as soon as we get to a town, we’ll call the police and tell them where you are.”

Twilight had arrived. Stars were beginning to appear in the deep purple of the eastern sky as it curved down to the horizon.

While Spencer drove the Bronco, Rocky panted in Ellie’s ear from the cargo area behind her seat. They found the way overland toward the highway with no difficulty. The route was clearly marked by the tire tracks in the snow that the truck had made on its trip into the picturesque basin.

“Why’d you tell them we’d call the police?” Spencer wondered.

“You want them to freeze?”

“I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”

“I won’t risk it.”

“Yeah, but these days, it’s possible—maybe not likely, but possible—that any call you make to a police department is going to be received on a caller-ID line, not just if you punch nine-one-one. Fact is, a smaller city like Grand Junction, with not so much street crime or so many demands on resources, is a lot more likely to have money to spend on fancy communications systems with all the bells and whistles. You call them, then they know right away the address you’re phoning from. It comes up on the screen in front of the police operator. And then they’ll know what direction we went, what road we left Grand Junction on.”

“I know. But we’re not going to make it that simple for them,” she said, and explained what she had in mind.

“I like it,” he said.

The Rocky Mountain Prison for the Criminally Insane had been constructed in the Great Depression, under the auspices of the Work Projects Administration, and it looked as solid and formidable as the Rockies themselves. It was a squat, rambling building with small, deep-set, barred windows even in the administration wing. The walls were faced with iron-gray granite. An even darker granite had been used for lintels, window stools, door and window surrounds, coins, and carved cornices. The whole pile slumped under a gabled attic and a black slate roof.

The general effect, Roy Miro felt, was as depressing as it was ominous. Without hyperbole, the structure could be said to brood high upon its hillside, as if it were a living creature. In the late-afternoon shadows of the steep slopes that rose behind the prison, its windows were filled with a sour-yellow light that might have been reflected through connecting corridors from the dungeons of some mountain demon who lived deeper in the Rockies.

Approaching the prison in the limousine, standing before it, and walking its public corridors to Dr. Palma’s office, Roy was overcome with compassion for the poor souls locked away in that heap of stone. He grieved as well for the equally suffering warders who, in looking after the deranged, were forced to spend so much of their lives in such circumstances. If it had been within his authority to do so, he would have sealed up every last window and vent, with all the inmates and attendants inside, and put them out of their misery with a gentle-acting but lethal gas.

Dr. Sabrina Palma’s reception lounge and office were so warmly and luxuriously furnished that, by contrast with the building that surrounded them, they seemed to belong not only in another and more exalted place—a New York penthouse, a Palm Beach bayside mansion—but in another age than the 1930s, a time warp in which the rest of the prison seemed still to exist. Sofas and chairs were recognizably by J. Robert Scott, upholstered in platinum and gold silks. Tables and mirror frames and side chairs were also by J. Robert Scott, done in a variety of exotic woods with bold grains, all either bleached or whitewashed. The deeply sculpted, beige-on-beige carpet might have been from Edward Fields. At the center of the inner office was a massive Monteverde & Young desk, in a crescent-moon shape, that must have cost forty thousand dollars.

Roy had never seen an office of any public official to equal those two rooms, not even in the highest circles of official Washington. He knew at once what to make of it, and he knew that he had a sword to hold over Dr. Palma if she gave him any resistance.

Sabrina Palma was the director of the prison medical staff. By virtue of its being as much hospital as prison, she was also the equivalent of a warden in any ordinary correctional facility. And she was as striking as her office. Raven-black hair. Green eyes. Skin as pale and smooth as pooled milk. Early forties, tall, svelte but shapely. She wore a black knit suit with a white silk blouse.

After identifying himself, Roy introduced her to Agent Olmeyer—

“Pleased to meet you, Doctor.”

—and Agent Tarkenton.

“Doctor.”

She invited them all to sit down.

“No, thank you, Doctor,” said Olmeyer, and took up a position to the right of the door that connected the inner and outer offices.

“No, thank you, Doctor,” said Tarkenton, and took up a position to the left of the same door.

Roy proceeded to one of three exquisite chairs in front of Dr. Palma’s desk as she circled to the plush leather throne behind it. She sat in a cascade of indirect, amber light that made her pale skin glow as if with inner fire.

“I’m here on a matter of the utmost importance,” Roy told her in as gracious a tone as he could command. “We believe—no, we are certain—that the son of one of your inmates is currently stalking the President of the United States and intends to assassinate him.”

When she heard the name of the would-be assassin and knew the identity of his father, Sabrina Palma raised her eyebrows. After she examined the documents that Roy withdrew from the white envelope and after she learned what he expected of her, she excused herself and went to the outer office to make several urgent telephone calls.

Roy waited in his chair.

Beyond the three narrow windows, spread out across the night below the prison, the lights of Denver gleamed and glittered.

He looked at his watch. By now, on the far side of the Rockies, Duvall and his twelve men ought to have settled inconspicuously into the creeping night. They wanted to be ready, in case the travelers arrived far earlier than anticipated.

The hood of night had fully covered the face of twilight by the time they reached the outskirts of Grand Junction.

With a population of over thirty-five thousand, the city was big enough to delay them. But Ellie had a penlight and the map that she had taken from the helicopter, and she found the simplest route.

Two-thirds of the way around the city, at a multiplex cinema, they stopped to go shopping for a new vehicle. Apparently, none of the shows was either letting out or about to begin, for no moviegoers were arriving or leaving. The sprawling parking lot was full of cars but devoid of people.

“Get an Explorer or a Jeep if you can,” she said as he opened the door of the Bronco, letting in a frigid draft. “Something like that. It’s more convenient.”

“Thieves can’t be choosers,” he said.

“They have to be.” As he got out, she shifted over behind the steering wheel. “Hey, if you’re not choosy, then you’re not a thief, you’re a trash collector.”

While Ellie drifted along one aisle, pacing him, Spencer moved boldly from vehicle to vehicle, trying the doors. Each time that he found one unlocked, he leaned inside long enough to check for keys in the ignition, behind the sun visor, and under the driver’s seat.

Watching his master through the side windows of the Bronco, Rocky whined as though with concern.

“Dangerous, yes,” Ellie said. “I can’t lie to the dog. But not half as dangerous as driving through the front of a supermarket with helicopters full of thugs on your tail. You’ve just got to keep this in perspective.”

The fourteenth set of wheels that Spencer tried was a big black Chevy pickup with an extended cab that provided both front and back seats. He climbed into it, pulled the door shut, started the engine, and reversed out of the parking slot.

Ellie parked the Bronco in the space that the Chevy had vacated. They needed only fifteen seconds to transfer the guns, the duffel bag, and the dog to the pickup. Then they were on their way again.

On the east side of the city, they started looking for any motel that appeared to have been recently constructed. The rooms in most older establishments were not computer friendly.

At a self-described “motor lodge” that looked new enough to have held its ribbon-cutting ceremony just hours ago, Ellie left Spencer and Rocky in the pickup while she went into the front office to ask the desk clerk if their accommodations would allow her to use her modem. “I have a report due at my office in Cleveland by morning.” In fact, all rooms were properly wired for her needs. Using her Bess Baer ID for the first time, she took a double with a queen-size bed and paid cash in advance.

“How soon can we be on the road again?” Spencer asked as they parked in front of their unit.

“Forty-five minutes tops, probably half an hour,” she promised.

“We’re miles from where we took the pickup, but I have a bad feeling about hanging around here too long.”

“You aren’t the only one.”

She couldn’t help but notice the decor of the room even as she took Spencer’s laptop computer out of the duffel bag, put it on the desk next to an arrangement of accessible plugs and phone jacks, and concentrated on getting it ready for business. Blue-and-black-speckled carpet. Blue-and-yellow-striped draperies. Green-and-blue-checkered bedspread. Blue and gold and silver wallpaper in a pale ameboid pattern. It looked like army camouflage for an alien planet.

“While you’re working on that,” Spencer said, “I’ll take Rocky out to do his business. He must be ready to burst.”

“Doesn’t seem in distress.”

“He’d be too embarrassed to let on.” At the door, he turned to her again and said, “I saw fast-food places across the street. I’ll walk over there and get us some burgers and stuff too, if that sounds like it would hit the spot.”

“Just buy plenty,” she said.

While Spencer and the pooch were gone, Ellie accessed the AT&T central computer, which she had penetrated a long time ago and had explored in depth. Through AT&T’s nationwide linkages, she had been able, in the past, to finesse her way into the computers of several regional phone companies at all ends of the country, although she’d never before tried to slide into the Colorado system. For a hacker as for a concert pianist or an Olympic gymnast, however, training and practice were the keys to success, and she was extremely well trained and well practiced.

When Spencer and Rocky returned after only twenty-five minutes, Ellie was already deep inside the regional system, scrolling rapidly down a dauntingly long list of pay-phone numbers with corresponding addresses that were arranged county by county. She settled on a phone at a service station in Montrose, Colorado, sixty-six miles south of Grand Junction.