Tintagel (12 page)

There were only five stations on the air, but one station played no news at all, unlike the others. Lanier and Christy looked at each other. The music they heard was electronic.

"Hohvannes," Lanier grinned. "And I'll bet no one will recognize it. The orchestrated version would probably take out half of the city."

The traffic swelled around them. They would make it to the airport before the noon traffic jams and the riot that would later cause several million dollars' worth of damage.

They would hear about it en route to Montana. And they would hear about the homemade Cruise missile that
almost
made it through the White House defenses.

Chapter Seven

Symphony No. 16 ("Unfinished") in G Minor

Dmitri Shostakovich

Lanier recalled how, in an old, old movie he had seen once when he was growing up in the wilds of New Mexico, an evil Pharaoh decided to move his tomb to a secret stretch of the Nubian Desert. It took hundreds of unwilling slaves to struggle with the man-sized marble blocks for the underground crypt. When it was constructed, the evil Pharaoh had his loyal guards spear the slaves to death so that the location of the jewels and gold to be entombed with him would not be disclosed, should any of the slaves escape to tell of the whereabouts of the treasures.

And, on the night of the Pharaoh's banquet—his farewell before the long sky voyage to Osiris—he sedulously poisoned even his most devoted followers, including his queen. He walked alone to his final resting place as the sands eventually blew across the hidden doorway that could only be opened from the inside.

Lanier thought very much the same thing during his move to a small ranch outside of Missoula, Montana. He had been quite fortunate deciding to abandon Los Angeles when he did. His meeting with the President had not gone unnoticed by the media hounds, and the gossip rags and scandal sheets across the country were rife with speculations, profiles, and political predictions. He detested the publicity, especially the media's way of excavating information about him. What they couldn't find in fact, they conjured as fiction.

But his chief reason for hating the attention was that it could only interfere with his work. It grieved him to have to be the one, ultimately, who decided just who was rescued from the Syndrome and who was not. His only consolation lay in the fact that there were many other Stalkers across the nation, and most of them took on charity cases on occasion. And most were still anonymous.

Yet, as the President had indicated, conditions in the United States alone had reached such a level of danger that every available government official and research scientist was needed to combat the effects of Liu Shan's Syndrome, particularly the biochemists. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta had reported outbreaks of a dozen diseases that hadn't appeared in America in over eighty years.

So it was extremely important that no one discover that Francis Lanier had transferred operations to Montana. Government people moved his equipment, people he could trust. His vast music library, his furniture, his files, everything, moved by the CIA, no less. Because of his shoulder, though, he couldn't assist them, and felt, as a consequence, somewhat helpless for the two weeks it took to move. He could empathize with that Hollywood Pharaoh. He would feel much better if there was an island someplace in the South Pacific, or a village on the coast of Wales where he could send these men for a few years just to be on the safe side.

He laughed at his own foolishness. He was beginning to think like some of his patients.

Charlie Gilbert had supervised Lanier's move to Montana, checking out all the important details of getting his papers in order and making certain that the whole business was dealt with inconspicuously. The ranch house that presided over the forty acres of land in the Bitterroot Valley had only recently been vacated by a farmer who had lost a wife and a daughter to the Syndrome. Lanier was sympathetic, and had considered helping the man as a favor, but Christy's list had grown, and there were priorities. Sadly, there were priorities.

While there was absolutely no question in anyone's mind that Christy was still to stay on as Lanier's aide-de-camp, Charlie Gilbert groaned about it for some time, but not out of disloyalty to Lanier. Charlie had a successful practice in Los Angeles, and had his own roots. They were just harder to pull up than Lanier's.

But Charlie put on his cowboy boots, flew his private jet to Missoula, and spent the day walking downtown in the Indian Summer air while Christy and Lanier spent the day in Washington. It would take a while to establish his own law practice in Missoula, but at least life was slower here, the air much cleaner.

He owed so much to Lanier, and he loved Christy dearly. Back in southern California, life wasn't getting much easier. Mexican terrorists, under the rule of someone named Draco, ruled a third of eastern Los Angeles, and with their stranglehold on the agricultural industry in the San Joaquin Valley there seemed little chance that southern California would return to stability soon.

So Charlie decided to move his practice, and his associates, and live with his wife in Montana. Despite the severe winters, he realized that, with so many people escaping the warmer climates where the aeroplankton throve, real estate swindles would keep him with plenty to do. Crooks were no different in Montana than in Los Angeles.

Charlie had the house divided into two parts. Christy needed a whole office of her own, including the music library and the files and the HomeCom links. Lanier himself didn't take up much space, so Charlie's ideas for the layout of the ranch house suited him. The three of them stayed in a hotel in town until the premises were ready, a hotel known for keeping things quiet.

And Lanier enjoyed waking up in the morning to see the mountains from his rear window, and breathing the fresh, clean air.

His shoulder felt a little too stiff for him to even begin considering a new project, but he and Christy had already scheduled a number of possibilities for the following week. He carefully exercised his shoulder every day, and now it was a question of time before he was ready to proceed. In any case, he was quite familiar with all the profiles that Christy had given him.

Yet he found much that was disquieting about the last several weeks in his life. His meeting with Katie Babcock had given rise to feelings and anxieties he felt he didn't have the strength to carry if they got out of hand. This came from being so much out of touch with the world.

But it isn't every day that a private citizen sits in council with the President of the United States. That meant something. If anything, he was impressed with the fact of the global nature of their troubles.

For the present, though, he took time to relax. Once settled in his ranch house, he spent many hours privately screening Ellie Estevan's films. Although he had the resources for film and video playback in his home, he lacked the adequate facilities for the two holovision films Ellie had made. Nevertheless, he spent many hours viewing the length and breadth of her career. Charlie had procured copies of her films, as well as several of the commercials she had made early in her career. Charlie also had his junior partners compile a rigorous analysis of her history as an actress. It came with items that HomeCom, or private access to DataCom, couldn't provide—publicity photos, clippings from gossip rags, evaluations by studios, and the like.

Ellie Estevan was an intriguing individual to say the least. Her charm seemed to burst from a simple photograph. Her presence onscreen filled theaters across the country, and in Europe, with an aura of overwhelming sexual power that was rarely encountered in any movie star. She was always in demand, and her love life was always a hot item for the scandal sheets.

Yet Lanier noticed that her appeal was particularly apt for the times.

She was still in her twenties, full of energy and spunk. Her soft blue eyes and short curly hair gave her an innocent look, the kind of innocence that the world had lost over the years. She had it. Her smile only hinted at sexuality, but her farm-girl quality made men yearn for her—or someone like her—desperately.

But the roles she took in her movies were anything but innocent. Like many of the female leads in the early years of the cinema, Ellie Estevan played everything from housewife to reformed hooker, from gun moll to Broadway sugarbaby. And these things she did very well. People left theaters shaking, or weeping, oftentimes getting back into line for the late show. Rioting was common at her premieres, particularly in Europe.

Lanier was genuinely surprised—and surprised at his own naiveté—at the stature she held within the industry. For the two years he had been a Stalker, he had had little time for gratuitous pleasures. Movies and holos were ruled out. He had known of Ellie Estevan from what little he had seen of her on television.

Her current film, the highly touted
From Earth's Center
, casts her as an ingenue who destroys the lives of three men—a young lawyer, a writer, and an older businessman who should have known better. The private copy Charlie had acquired for him allowed Lanier to view it objectively, he believed, without the presence of a theater audience. Lanier found it well acted, well written, and tragic.

The music in the movie was totally electronic, and quite listenable, derived from the obscure composition of a man named Fast from the last century. The scenes were staged very carefully, the timing perfect. But one scene in
From Earth's Center
caught his attention.

A close-up shot near the end of the movie had Ellie Estevan as Margo Dalton staring out over the ruins of a fallen space shuttle, on which the multimillionaire businessman had been present. Lanier was startled by the calmness on her face. True, this was Margo Dalton—not Ellie Estevan—a cold-blooded, ambitious woman of twenty-eight. Margo Dalton was calm, heartless, and totally unmoved by the destruction she had wrought.

But Ellie's eyes were exactly like Lanier's. The whole facial expression betrayed her detachment. They were the eyes of the kids he played with when he was young in Santa Fe. And they were quite like the eyes of his benefactor in the mountains south of his hometown. He hadn't seen such serenity in years.

Naturally, on Ellie Estevan, those eyes were compelling and beautiful. Lanier got the impression from the last scene that she in some way had been miscast for the role: she could
act
heartless, but those little-girl eyes seen in real daylight were the eyes of a special person.

Yet he felt that idea wasn't entirely true, either. Ellie Estevan was a gold mine of contradictions. When Margo Dalton turned away from the flaming hulk of the space shuttle, back to her new lover's air car, her demeanor, her physical presence, suggested a calculated energy that could burst with an awesome range of power at any moment, like a cougar's stored magic as it waits in a tree. It was fitting that Ellie Estevan was an actress. Creatively, she would have succeeded at anything she had put her mind to.

There was nothing in Charlie's profiles that could enlighten him on Ellie Estevan's relationship to Perry Eventide. It was just one of those things.

Christy came into the small living room from her office.

"I did it," she merrily announced. "Got you an invite." She folded her arms proudly.

Lanier looked up from the couch and the morning's paper.

"Great, when is it?"

"There will be a party at Burton Shaughnessy's mansion near Aspen in a week's time. The weekend coming up, actually. Ellie Estevan will be there, and Burton Shaughnessy is eager to meet you. I guess this is the only benefit from being exposed with the President."

Lanier tossed the paper down. "Luck, I'd say. So Ellie didn't go under, it seems. What did you tell him?"

She smiled. "I told him that now that you have been brought out into the open, you've been considering helping out the movie industry. The city of Los Angeles is practically under siege, but the movie industry survives. He nibbled and bit."

"I'm looking forward to this."

"It's supposed to start sometime Friday, noonish, and he said that it would last the entire weekend."

"Sounds regular for Shaughnessy, if what I've been reading about him is true."

"I think it is," she explained. "There are two or three a year, mostly for political hustling within the industry itself. He's a big wheel. But then again, he probably loves parties."

Lanier got up. "I just hope that there will be others of my kind there." He seemed worried. "I don't know if I'll fit in."

Christy smiled at his shyness. "Listen, accept it. You're high profile now. All the known Stalkers are. There'll be some politicos and government people, writers and producers. Not just movie stars. Most will probably not know you, or care. Not if Ms. Estevan is present."

"Thanks."

"You welcome," she smirked.

Lanier sank deeper into his bathrobe, grinning. "Why, Christy, do I detect disappointment?"

"Not the slightest," she said feigning indifference, turning back toward the music library.

"Hey, you want to go along? You and Charlie?" He meant it.

She looked back. "No," smiling, "but stay out of trouble. Those bitches can drain a man in nothing flat. All that's left is a shell."

"I've suffered worse, believe me," he said, and he went back to the morning scandal sheet.

Aspen, Colorado, had already settled into the spell of autumn. The heavy snows of winter were a few weeks away, thus the winter tourists were nowhere to be seen. High above him, on the steeply sloping mountains, Lanier could see the aspen leaves turning their beautiful gold as the cold air surrounded them. The skiing afficionados and other seasonal crazies would be arriving in a couple of weeks when the first flake fell and stuck, but for all the white that would soon grace these peaks, Lanier preferred the colors that the fall had brought.
Peaceful
, he thought to himself.
Not austere like the mountains
in winter
.