The Fury and the Terror (44 page)

"Neither of us seems to be afforded much privacy by our circumstance."

"What a world," Rona said, drinking. "But I learned a long time ago to study all the pug marks around my waterhole, learn the habits of the ... creatures who make them."

"Until thirty-six hours ago, my granddaughter had led exactly the sort of life I wanted and hoped for her. It may be possible for Eden to find that life again."

"Oh, I don't think so."

"With difficulty. With the help of those who love her."

"Let's be realists, Katharine."

"Your view of 'reality' is appalling."

"Eden has
come out
, don't you understand? With her bloodlines she's one of a kind. You know Bob Hyde; he thinks psychics are potential enemies of the state. The Bureau screwed up badly on psi research and instead of going with the trend he snuffs all the psi-actives he comes across. Today Bob had his SWATs hunting Eden, probably with orders to shoot her on sight."

Katharine reacted as if Rona had dropped a burning match in her lap. Rona said soothingly, "From the information I have, Bob may have seriously underestimated our girl. The Air Force helos he co-opted for the hunt are long overdue at their base in California. Now let's get back to the point.
Have you heard from Eden today?
"

"No."

"Do you know where she is?"

"If I did—"

"You wouldn't tell me? Don't you understand how
wrong
you are? I thought I'd detected some concern for Eden. But with all of your money, your resources, you can't protect her. Hyde and the Bureau are relentless. So are the agents for a hundred nations eager to see this country fall. They would find Eden very useful to their purposes. There is only one place on this earth where the girl will be safe from now on.
Here
, Katharine. The White House. Under
our
sovereign protection."

Katharine sipped from her glass, eyes closing briefly.

"Turn Eden over to you?"

"Why not? You did it before. How do you think she'll feel about you once she knows this?"

"Eden has always known she was adopted."

"I call it abandonment," Rona said ruthlessly. "No justification. Cold-blooded. You didn't want her. That's how Eden will see it. Call me anything you like, but never say I don't know what makes human beings work. I've taken plenty of them apart in my time."

"Leaving the ruins where they fell," Katharine said. She shook her head grimly. "What matters ... is how we make amends for our mistakes. How we say we're truly sorry. Tom—"

Rona caught the misstep. Katharine looked into her glass, wincing slightly.

"You were going to say?"

"Nothing."

"Tom? Tom Sherard? Gillian's husband, yes?
And
another of your ex-lovers. That's what life is all about; interesting situations." Rona had a glow on; she was nearly vibrating, like a plucked cello string. "Oh. I get it. You sent
him
, didn't you? To fetch Eden home. See? There's another mistake. You should have gone to her right away, instead of sitting back, waiting for the girl to be brought to you. She's going to resent that, Kath."

"I think it's time we said good night."

"So soon? I was hoping you'd stay over. We have a vacant bed or two. Historical significance. Important people have bled and died in them."

"That's very gracious of you ... Rona. But I will be going."

"Clint'll be here in an hour. I thought you'd want to say hello." Rona paused to savor a moment of yearning in Katharine's eyes. "There is a slight possibility that he might remember you."

Katharine stood, setting her glass down. She stared at Rona until Rona's whimsical grin crept beneath her skin.

"It's beyond my comprehension how you can abuse him as you so obviously plan to do. And run the risk of ... turning Clint into a humiliated, pathetic figure before the eyes of the world."

"Believe me. There's no risk."

"What can you hope to gain?"

"Here at the White House we're all just doing our damnedest to get the ship of state back on an even keel. Protecting your vital interests, as well as mine. By the way, the polls tell me a majority of true-blue Americans think that the United Nations is obsolete, as well as a threat to our internal security and sovereignty. All of these half-assed little dictatorships with the GDP of a sidewalk hot-dog cart voting against the most powerful nation in the world on matters crucial to our economic development—I want to puke all over my
Post
when I read about it. You and I need to sit down soon and rap about the job you're doing up there. Good night, Katharine. I'll look forward to meeting Eden in the very near future. We'll get along great. I relate well to kids her age; my polls show they're my biggest support group."

"Your polls? It almost sounds as if you're running for office," Katharine said, pausing on her way out.

Rona had not bothered to uncurl from the love seat to walk Katharine to the door. She returned Katharine's looking-back stare with a blunt look of her own.

"Run for President? Why should I? I'm already there."

MOBY BAY, CALIFORNIA • MAY 30 • 7:12 A.M. PDT

T
he eight California Air National Guard search and rescue helicopters, older-model Hueys with exterior tanks for extended-range flying, appeared shortly after sunrise in the vicinity of Moby Bay. Observers saw a town already preparing for a heavy influx of tourists. Delivery truck drivers were unloading cases of food and drink for the ice cream and doughnut shoppes and Moby Bay's two cafés, the Gray Whale and the Keg 'n' Burger. Merchants were hosing down the sidewalks in front of their establishments or replacing, red, white, and blue bunting that had been damaged in the late-afternoon storm of the previous day.

A convoy of government motor pool sedans and eight-passenger vans that had left Sacramento at two-thirty A.M. drove into town a short while later, escorted by highway patrol cars. Twenty-six FBI agents from the San Francisco and Sacramento field offices. They bought six dozen doughnuts and coffee and ate their breakfasts while they canvassed the town with photos of Eden Waring.

Chauncey McLain and her brother Roald were helping their father set up a sidewalk exhibition of paintings by local artists. Three FBI agents, led by Dolph Hackett from Sacramento, called on her. One of them was carrying an evidence bag. Hackett told Wick McLain they needed to ask Chauncey some questions, was there a place they could talk to her off the street? Wick blustered some, saying,
What's this about?
and,
My daughter hasn't done anything
, and Chauncey smiled reassuringly at him,
Of course not, it'll be okay, Dad
, and Wick said,
Well all right why don't you use my office in the back but leave the door open please where I can see my daughter while you're talking to her
.

They showed Chauncey a photo of Eden Waring. Chauncey studied it thoughtfully, then allowed the light to dawn. "Oh! Didn't I see her on TV? She's the girl who had a premonition about the plane crash over there in Innisfall, saved just a whole bunch of people, right?"

"But you don't know her personally?" Hackett asked.

"No. If I'd ever met her, I think I would remember. But, you know, when I'm on tour I meet so many people."

Hackett glanced at the agent with the evidence bag, who took out the wrinkled Mighty Ducks hockey jersey with Chauncey's name sewed in it. "Does this belong to you, Miss McLain?"

"I did have one like that. Number 12. I wore it sometimes on tour last fall."

"What tour are you talking about?"

"I'm with
Pussy Whip
. Do you guys listen to metal?" The youngest of the agents smiled but didn't commit himself in front of the boss. Chauncey liked his curly hair and forthright jaw. She addressed herself exclusively to him. "We've cut three albums. I don't think there's any around the gallery, but I could send you one.
Feeding the Sharks
is our latest." She turned the jersey inside out and peered closely at the name tag. "It's my shirt, all right, here's my name! Isn't that crazy? I don't have
any
idea where I might have left it; we played thirty-nine venues in forty-six days."

Dolph Hackett grilled her for another ten minutes concerning Eden. Chauncey remained charming, chatty, and uninformative. They wouldn't let her keep the hockey jersey. Hackett said it might be returned to her, eventually. As the G-men were leaving the young agent spoke for the first time.

"How did you get hurt?"

She was wearing a soft bulky cast from the ankle down on her left foot. Chauncey gave him her brightest smile of the morning.

"Oh, just horsing around. Bye, nice meeting all of you. And hey, good luck."

Chauncey watched them go, gathered up the used coffee cups and dumped them in a wastebasket. She yawned. No sleep at all last night. No sleep for any of the citizens of Moby Bay. There had been just a heck of a lot of tidying up to do. But her wrapped foot was one of two reminders of yesterday's encounter with attack helicopters and government men with hostile attitudes who would forever be unaccounted for no matter how long the search went on. Lost perhaps in a sparsely inhabited wilderness area, or deep down in the graveyard sea.

The other reminder, of course, was Eden herself. Not lost, just missing for now. Chauncey comforted herself with the thought. They would meet again.

FLAMING RIVER RANCH, IVANHOE, CALIFORNIA • MAY 30 • 8:50 A.M. PDT

E
den heard voices outside and a good distance away; more distant than the voices were the sounds of sheep. She opened shuttered doors of her cavernous room and walked out onto a dark-floored veranda polished to a gleam. There was a sloping roof overhead with old-fashioned ceiling fans, red metal lanterns on the whitewashed walls, some rugged-looking, eighteenth-century mission-style furniture. Her eyes watered from the brilliance of a cloudless sky over low forested mountains. She saw a stable with a Mexican red tile roof, two windmills, sheepcotes, a small orchard, a few cottonwood trees along a river split by low sandbars into many streams like spilled molten silver, and a marshy pond with ducks coasting amid the cattails. Beyond the river cattle grazed on open foothill range. She saw a horseman and a pack of motley ranch dogs, led by a Great Dane, trotting beside the horse.

Voices.

Eden shook her foggy head and cleared a dry throat. She had a case of nerves. And she was very hungry. She smelled woodsmoke and meat on a grill, followed the shady veranda to a courtyard that was almost the size of a football field. It was partly enclosed by four ranch buildings, including the hacienda she'd come out of, crossed at random by wide graveled paths that led variously to a small chapel with a bronze bell in a cupola; a swimming pool filled by a fountain made from an old half-stuccoed adobe brick chimney that stood tall at one end; garden plots with rock and sand and pieces of gray driftwood accenting green cactus, scarlet paintbrush, and softball-size tomatoes on the vine; outdoor ovens in a loaflike construct of plastered adobe; a smokehouse and a three-tiered fountain covered in ceramic tiles the size of postage stamps. Near the kitchen a breezy pergola stood between two centuries-old California oaks.

Three Hispanics were at work, one of them with a long-handled iron fry pan the size of a manhole cover. Four people were seated around a plain wooden table in the pergola, apparently in the early stages of breakfast. Two of them, both Oriental, were strangers to Eden. The other two were virtual strangers. They had brought her to this ranch, wherever she was, from Moby Bay, arriving in the middle of the night. Eden with sickening memories and a monumental headache, nerves like prowling spiders beneath the skin. A woman named Luisa had taken her directly to a cool candlelit room and a palatial four-poster bed with diaphanous curtains hung all around. Luisa gave her a tablespoon of dark liquid for her headache and nerves, talking almost nonstop but in a low voice, comforting words in Spanish as Eden moaned. Then she applied cold cloths, dipped in something pleasantly astringent, to Eden's head. Between the third and fourth cloths she had fallen deeply asleep.

"Would someone please tell me where I am?"

They hadn't seen her coming. The tall Englishman got up right away and walked toward her. He had a limp. She remembered that his name was Tom. The African beauty, turning now, smiling at Eden, was Alberta. She had dim memories of being socked by "Bertie," which was what the Englishman had called her during the long drive. Other than that Eden didn't know a damn thing about either of them. Where they'd come from, what they wanted from her. They'd been pleasant but not all that talkative. Not about to drop her at the nearest bus stop. At pee breaks Bertie went into the john with her, as if Eden had the energy to attempt a getaway. Eden was by turns afraid of and indifferent to them; then, as it grew dark and late, she was apathetic about everything, half conscious, wanting only not to be tortured by the sight of Chauncey McLain rising up from the patio floor of her house with a large ugly bullet hole in her forehead.

Moby Bay is a special place. Protected.