The Fury and the Terror (33 page)

"Well, I can't take it home with
me
."

"We can't just let it die."

"Maybe it isn't dying."

"Sure looked that way. Poor kitty."

"Maybe I could ask my mom."

"You've got three cats already, Jana."

"It belongs to
some
body. It's wearing a collar."

Bertie relaxed, breathed deeply, and said, "What's up, guys?"

The girls stopped and looked her over. Decided she was okay. One of them pointed back along the jogging path.

"There's this cat in a tree. A white cat. Looks like a dog got after it or something. One ear's torn and bloody. And its fur is dirty."

Another girl said, "I smelled smoke."

"I'm Bertie. What's your name?"

She was the smallest and youngest. "Jana."

The others introduced themselves.

"Grace."

"Danielle."

"Sisters?"

"Cousins," Danielle said. "We're all cousins."

"Where's this cat you're talking about?"

"We could show you."

"I've gotta go," Jana said.

"No, you don't," Grace, the oldest, said. "Mom said two-thirty and it's only twenty after."

"I mean peepee!"

"Oh. Why didn't you do it in the woods? Okay, tell Mom we'll be right there." She looked up at Bertie. "You wanta see?"

"Sure. I like cats. We had a couple on the farm when I was growing up."

"What kind were they? Siamese?"

"African lions," Bertie said. Grace and Danielle looked at each other, confirming that they were too sharp to put up with this. Bertie shrugged.

"I grew up in Africa."

She answered a dozen questions about her childhood and the coffee plantation in Kenya on the short walk to where the girls had discovered the injured cat.

It wasn't easy to see, crouched a dozen feet off the ground where two leafy limbs of the oak joined the trunk. A young Persian with a crusty cut on one ear. Only a small part of its fur, on and around the face and breast where it had been able to clean itself, was white or grayish. The rest of the fur was blackly streaked or singed. The cat had lost most of its whiskers, apparently to the fire it had barely escaped. The cat's eyes were closed, as if it was too exhausted to pay attention to them.

"Do you think kitty was in the plane that crashed?" Danielle asked.

The older girl said, "Everything on board burned up. Except the one they have in the hospital. She was thrown out but she's not going to live. That's what Rich's mother told him, and she's a surgical nurse."

"Let's have a look," Bertie said, moving closer to the tree. The cat's eyes opened partway at her approach. Bertie stood very still, gazing up, a hand raised high above her head. She remained that way, relaxed and motionless, long enough for the girls to become restless.

"What are you going to do?" Grace asked.

"Figure out a way to get him down. Take him to a vet for shots and stitches. He was on the plane, for sure. Traumatized, but I'm sure he'll be okay."

Grace said, "What's traumatized?"

"He's scared. In shock."

"How do you know it's a boy cat?" Danielle asked.

"Oh—just something about him. I can't explain."

"
Danielle. Gracie!
"

"That's Jana. We better go. Thanks for taking care of him, Bertie. You gonna adopt him?"

Bertie smiled but didn't look around at them. Nearly all of her attention was focused on the cat. Her right hand remained in the air, fingers spread, moving slightly, as if she were reading something written there in spectral braille. The Persian cat had lifted its head and was staring at her.

"I'll just leave that up to Warhol," she said. "When he's feeling better, and we've had a chance to talk."

WESTBOUND/CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY 299 • MAY 29 • 2:25 P.M. PDT

T
hey were waiting for Geoff and Eden Waring's doppelganger at the bridge over the Burnt Oak River in the mountain town of Valleyheart, sixty miles east of Moby Bay. Two SUVs from the sheriff's department and a unit of the California Highway Patrol. Geoff spotted them from half a mile away as he was driving down the narrow switchback road into town.

He came to a skidding stop. The convertible top was down. He looked at the bridge in the valley; saw the glint of sunlight on binocular lenses. They were expecting him.

"Oh, my God."

"You must've been right about the helicopter," the dpg said. "Can you go back?"

Geoff appraised his chances. Cliff wall on the right side of the road, steep forested slope on his left, with a steel guardrail nearly flush with the road.

"By the time I get turned around, they'll be up here. If they've done this right, there'll be another car comin' up behind us, any minute."

"Back up. Just out of sight of those deputies at the bridge."

"Why?"

"You're getting out."

"What for?"

"Who do they really want, you or me? Eden, I mean."

"Eden."

"Back up, get out, climb over the guardrail. Find something to hang on to for a few minutes. Just don't let them see you."

"What are you gonna do?"

She grinned at him.

"You'll find out. When it's all over, if you don't see me around, retrieve your car and go to Moby Bay. The family's name is McLain. Eden's staying with them."

"Every law enforcement agency in northern California has my vehicle description and plate number by now. If they're usin' helicoptahs—"

"That's a good point. Maybe you ought to borrow one of their cars, tune in on the radio traffic. Come on, let's get moving."

Geoff put the Taurus in reverse and screeched uphill around a sharp curve in the road, stopped. They heard a siren on the road behind them. "Leave the engine running," she said.

Geoff vaulted out of the car, cleared the guardrail, slid on his heels a dozen feet down the slope that ended at a precipice, and grabbed a flowering purple rhododendron well rooted in the feldspar. Looking up, he couldn't see the road. Then Eden's face appeared above the guardrail.

"Give me about twenty minutes," she said. "That should be long enough for them to call in that pesky helicopter. Lay low, then head for the bridge. I've got your car. Don't worry, I'll take good care of it."

E
den's dpg was halfway to the Burnt Oak River in the Taurus when the other CHP car came flying up behind her, blue lights flashing.

She continued downhill at twenty-five miles per hour, swerving to keep the highway patrol from passing and cutting in front of her.

Fifty feet from the police-model Ford Explorers blocking the bridge, she stopped, pushed the cheap sunglasses Geoff had bought her above her hairline, and sat with hands high on the wheel of the Taurus as law dogs of various jurisdictions converged on the car. Guns drawn. One of them was even pointing a shotgun at her, as if she butchered small children and drank their blood.

The driver's door was yanked open.

"Step out of the car! Step out of the car
now
. Hands where we can see them!"

"Yes, sir. Please don't shoot me."

One of the deputies, a woman, pulled her away from the car. Not too gently. She had a sweaty forehead and a glum nearly lipless mouth. Nameplate read R. HUMBARD. Another dep was reaching for handcuffs. That wouldn't do, the doppelganger decided.

"Are you Eden Waring?"

"Who?"

"Is your name Eden Waring!"

"No."

"Where's the man who was in the car with you?"

"He's hiding in the trunk. He has a shotgun. I'd be careful."

That distracted all of them. Long enough for her to slip out of the grasp of Deputy Humbard, run furiously the dozen yards to the river's edge, and jump.

The Burnt Oak River was about six feet deep from spring runoff, clear and swift, dashing over and around a bed full of boulders. Near the bridge where she went in the rocks were fewer. She popped up in a flume and was swept beneath the bridge. Deputy Humbard had just a glimpse of the dpg's soaked red head before she disappeared again.

"Help!" Eden's doppelganger yelled to enhance the effect, her voice producing an echo in the gloom below the single arched concrete span.

"She's in the river!" Humbard advised, scrambling down the bank herself but staying clear of the rushing water. She flipped up her sunglasses but couldn't see anything beneath the bridge. She climbed the nearly vertical bank and ran to the other side. Meanwhile four deputies and highway patrol cops were trying to flush what they thought was a man with a shotgun—as dangerous as a spitting cobra—from the trunk of the car without putting themselves in harm's way. They stood well back with their own shotguns leveled while the sheriff unlocked the trunk lid, using the lid release inside the Taurus.

Deputy Humbard looked downriver to a bend where the tree-heavy banks were lower and the river broadened into a series of shallow rapids. The dpg was nowhere to be seen.

The deputy ran to one of the SUVs and grabbed a flashlight from the front seat.

The trunk of the Taurus was open, but the lid remained down. There was a lot of shouting going on.

Deputy Humbard climbed down to the river's edge again and disappeared with her flashlight beneath the bridge.

None of the other deputies and officers could figure out how to raise the trunk lid without risking their lives.

A military helicopter had appeared five hundred feet overhead, casting a shadow over the scene but making only about as much noise as a bass boat outboard. They had to look up to be sure it was there. Only one of the deputies, who had been an Army reservist until he joined the sheriff's department, had seen a stealth helicopter before. It was an eerie sight in this remote part of the country, like a UFO appearing in broad daylight, and it added to the tension.

Another deputy had an idea. He pulled rescue equipment from his SUV, extracted dacron rope with a hook on one end, eased himself into the back-seat of the convertible, threw the rope and hook over the trunk, and yanked the lid up.

Deputy Humbard climbed up to the roadway with some soaked wadded clothing and a pair of wet leather sandals in one hand. She stared at the hovering nearly silent helicopter for a few seconds, then joined the guys, who were unloading the trunk of Geoff's Taurus. Tool kit, fire extinguisher, gym bag, a metal suitcase, locked.

"Sheriff?" Humbard said. "This is what she had on when she jumped in the river. No sign of her now."

She wrung out and spread a Mighty Ducks hockey jersey on the hood of the Taurus, added a pair of nylon running shorts and the sandals. "You think she drowned down there under the bridge?"

"No, sir. She had to've pulled herself out of the current to take her clothes off. Sayin' if this is all she had on. Didn't find underwear. But I guarantee she's not down there. There's just no place to hide."

"Maybe dived in again, swum naked underwater downstream."

"I suppose she could've, little ways, but I never caught sight of her. Then the river gets too shallow at the bend for anything but wadin' and rafting."

The sheriff pondered the athletic jersey on the hood of the Taurus, stroking his short salt-and-pepper beard. He wore sunglasses with yellow reflective lenses. He took them off and looked closer, then picked up the jersey. Deputy Humbard was in the front seat of the Taurus, searching.

"I don't see a purse or a wallet even."

"Here's a name tag," the sheriff said. "See if you can make it out, Rache."

She took the jersey from him. "Yes, sir. Looks like Chan—, no, that's a
u
there, so it's
Chauncey
, McLain."

The helicopter moved on, across the river and the heads of town folk gathered at the other end of the bridge, and settled in for a landing opposite the Chevron station a block away. Sideways, blocking Valleyheart's main drag.

The sheriff turned and looked at it. A blue light was blinking inside the cockpit. He couldn't see anyone inside. But the booger was big enough, he thought, to hold eight men, not including the pilot.

"Sheriff," one of his deputies said, "you better come look at what's in this metal suitcase."

"If it's a severed head, just close it up again. I only ate my lunch a half hour ago."

"No, sir, it's weapons. High-grade stuff. A broke-down fifty-caliber with a humongous damn scope. And a MP-5."

The sheriff looked at the helicopter again. A door had opened.

"Close it up anyway. I have a hunch we're about to go out of business here. This whole deal may be something we don't want to know too much about."

They were dropping down from the helicopter now, men in dark blue windbreakers or ballistics vests and baseball caps with FBI stenciled on them in bold white letters. Six men. Three of them carried automatic weapons.