A few miles after they turned north off US 54, Vic pulled over and stopped. "What's going on?" Frank asked him.
"I feel dopey. I need one of you to drive a while."
Frank looked at Paul. "Have you got a driver's license?"
The Indian nodded. He got out and went around to the driver's side. Vic went around to the off-side.
"Don't you want to get in the back?" asked Frank.
"Maybe later. Just now, though, it's not so much needing the rest. It feels like there's something I need to do that takes more attention than I can give it when I'm driving."
Frank nodded. "Got it," he said.
Paul shifted into gear and they started out again. Vic leaned back, closed his eyes, and let his head sag. Within seconds he became aware of a presence with his: Tory's. They weren't in the cab together, or on the ranch, or anywhere in particular, but in that limbo of no location, no space, no time, outside of any universe. There was no thought there, but only being, and there was continuance in a static now without time. They were there while five minutes passed in the Tikh Cheki Matrix.
It was rejuvenative, but they did not continue longer there because they had committed themselves to intentions, and wished to persist in those intentions. So after five minutes they returned to the matrix at a place called Dallas—in a suburb called Irving, actually—in the state of Texas. The man in the heavily curtained west room had the power to perceive their presence, but they were in the basement, and he was not alert to the possibility of intruders.
Here, with the ghosts, they continued their activity of the night before, and when they were done, the entities that once had worn the identities Lefty Nagel and Leo Hochman were no longer confined. And though also freed of any hostility or grudge toward Kurt Hardman, they were nonetheless agreeable to playing a game which might have been called "Foil the Four."
Hardman's home was now haunted, but covertly.
Vic and Tory weren't done, though; there was someone else who was ready—more than ready. Tory put her attention on an entity who happened to be at a matrix coordinate known as the Studio City Fitness Salon.
Miki Ludi had just finished showering after leading a class in dance aerobics, and now sat down in her office. Since her sister-in-law had left, she'd been attempting to handle accounts herself—billing, logging in payments received, cutting checks to creditors—the essential minima of Carol's work. Her violet-blue eyes looked distastefully at the stack awaiting her; if she did not hear from Carol today, saying she'd be back inside a week, she would hire a temporary.
Right now though, she felt—sleepy. Unusual. She was trying to avoid the piled-up pending-basket, she decided, and took the top item off the stack. Pacific Bell Telephone; that was a simple one, easy to start with.
But it was foolish to try to function, as sleepy as she was. And she could hardly sleep too long sitting at her desk. She got up and locked her door, sat back down, and rested her head on her crossed arms. For just a few minutes, she told herself.
She awoke smoothly and looked at her wall clock: twelve minutes. Without even looking at the pending-basket, she got up and went to the Nautilus room, where Donni, her right-hand girl, was supervising exercises. She drew her aside.
"I'm taking the rest of the day off," she said. "I'm getting so stale, I can't stand myself." It wasn't the truth, but it was something Donni could understand; she used the "getting stale" bit herself. "You're in charge until I get back."
Donni nodded, and Miki left, getting into her Corvette and starting for home.
Ole Sigurdsson turned over the wheel to Carol and got in the back. They were no longer being elusive; he no longer felt any need for it. They were on Interstate 40 now, headed for Oklahoma City and Interstate 35.
The blue Ford van didn't provide him with the sense of possession the Caddy had, but it was roomy and comfortable. He lay down in back and went to sleep.
Hardman had become a part of the grid—more specifically, part of its viewscreen—operating almost robotically. He had neglected his body for years, except sexually, and been under the influence of amphetamines continually for almost twenty-four hours. His eyes were bloodshot, his pulse rate 109; his blood pressure, had anyone taken it, would have read 175/115. When his body felt too squirmy to bear, he signalled his housekeeper; Maria would come in and give him a light massage without distracting him from the screen. He was in frequent telepathic touch with Gracco, who was getting increasingly tired and grouchy.
Through the gridman, Gracco was following the progress of the black pickup on a highway atlas, hampered somewhat because some of the minor roads taken were not on its pages. Occasionally he contacted one of the network that Milazzo and Manoukian had provided, to give a predicted, reachable hit location. But the goddamn truck kept changing routes. At least twice, prior to Wichita, he'd apparently had people within three miles of interception, but mostly they were out of contact—were without mobile phones—and none had sighted their quarry.
In the Wichita area he'd had three hit squads out—one of them with a mobile phone. How close could you get and still miss? Gracco's urbane confidence had evaporated after the fiasco outside Benny's. This Merlin was the luckiest sonofebitch on the continent, if not the entire planet, and Gracco was psychic enough to know that luck wasn't something you fell into. You created it. Ergo, Merlin was even more able than he'd expected—dangerously able.
Gracco was beginning to think of his arrangements with Olson as more than just an exercise in emergency backup planning. Minnesota, even Duluth, could easily prove to be where it would finally happen—or fail to happen.
He rejected the last thought as defeatist, and refused to acknowledge it further. When Merlin escaped Wichita, Gracco had left word with Moller there to send someone speeding north up I-135 to Newton and hit the side roads from there. Two more cars were speeding southwest from Topeka, and one each had been dispatched from Salina and Junction City. They all had CB radios, but only one from Topeka and the car from Salina had phones; the others he could only get directions to through intermediaries, via their CB radios. It was hard to coordinate an operation like that—hard even to get information accurately relayed. But with a little luck... And there was that word again.
When he saw Merlin replaced behind the wheel by the hitchhiker, Hardman had roused from robo-ism and felt briefly hopeful. It did not occur to the gridman that psychic alertness might be effortless. For him it was tiring; prolonged, it was grueling. So it seemed to him that the exercise of psychic powers must have worn down Merlin and his brawny jock henchman. And though somehow they'd roped the hitchhiker into their game—his part in the Wichita melee had shown that—the Indian could hardly have the psychically directed evasiveness they'd shown.
That had been forty minutes ago. Since then the pursuit car from Wichita, closing fast, had been forced into a long detour when a cattle truck had broken down ahead of it on a narrow county bridge. The cars from Topeka, on I-70 and US 56, were still some distance away, though closing. The cars from Junction City and Salina were jockeying for intercepting positions, but only one of them had direct contact with Gracco. It seemed to Hardman that success there was quite uncertain.
And he was not sure how much longer he could continue to ride the grid—ten or twelve hours at most. He hadn't slept at all since the day before—about the time Merlin had left New Mexico—and once he crashed, he wouldn't be much good for at least a day. This, it seemed to him, was the time to finish Merlin's ass, whatever it took, which meant it was chance-taking time.
Merlin had avoided the broad, rolling rangeland of the Flint Hills, keeping to well-settled prairie farmland where roads at one-mile intervals laid their own grid on the country. Now Hardman decided he needed to see not only the pickup and its immediate surroundings, but as much of the local road network as possible, so he moved his viewpoint to an altitude of 3,000 feet local.
The pickup looked larger from there than he might have thought, and he could see a large stretch of farmland—dark-gray soil with a tinge of green where winter wheat had sprouted, shades of tawny where stubble still marked last year's fields of wheat, sorghum, corn.
While keeping track of the pickup, he asked Gracco for a description of the nearest two hit cars, and to keep him apprised of their approximate locations. Gracco told him to go fuck himself, he had no time for that, but a minute or two later told him what the cars looked like and approximately where they were. After another five minutes, apparently both cars were within three minutes of Merlin, and closing. The hit cars from Topeka were eight and twelve miles away, the one from Wichita farther still.
Hardman drew his viewpoint back to 4,500 feet; from there the black pickup was tiny but still recognizable. A minute later he could see a car which a quick zoom identified as the Salina car, and shortly, the car from Junction City. The pickup turned east onto a gravel road, on a course that intersected with the road the Junction City car had taken, but the Junction City car would have to speed up to get to the crossroads first. Hastily, he told all this to Gracco.
On the screen, Hardman could see both of the chase cars speed up. He was sweating now, tending to hold his breath till he felt suffocated. He zoomed his viewpoint down to about one thousand feet. The pickup was less than a half mile from the crossing when the Junction City car arrived there and turned toward them.
The pickup braked abruptly, as if its driver knew what car that was; he jockeyed quickly around on the narrow right of way and sped back the way he had come, only to see the Salina car reach the crossroad in that direction.
The pickup never paused. There was a tightly grown osage-orange windbreak along the north side of the road, with a gap that allowed farm machinery in and out of the field. Paul whipped the pickup through the gap and started across a field of corn stubble; it bounced violently as it crossed the rows. The Junction City car sped after it, the Salina car following, both cars slamming hard on springs and shocks never meant for off-road stresses.
The pursuers were keeping pace. A man in the lead car was leaning out a window, squeezing off shots with an automatic pistol, but the car lurched and bounced too wildly to allow accurate fire. In a moment of sudden determination, Hardman projected his psyche into the pickup itself, striking at the driver's mind. Paul bellowed, jerked the wheel as if fighting with it, and the pickup careened, almost rolled, before Hardman recoiled, momentarily blinded, from the response that struck him.
Meanwhile, the pistol fire had stopped; in the bouncing car, the gunman had banged his temple against the front edge of the window while leaning out, and for a moment almost lost consciousness. Halfway across the mile to the next road, the pickup went from stubble into new winter wheat, where the ground had been disked in the fall. It was soft, and there was no time to get out and set the hubs for four-wheel drive. Paul shifted down, the big tires throwing dirt and young wheat sprouts. Now the truck bounced less, but still bounced, and briefly its lead shrank. Then the first sedan reached the wheat, where the car quickly bogged.
A man jumped out with a rifle, cursing, and threw a wild fusillade of bullets after the pickup. The second sedan stopped before it reached the wheat, one of its men getting out with an automatic carbine, adding its firepower to the rifle's.
Paul, his jaw clenched, kept the truck moving, his meaty fists gripping the steering wheel tightly, and they gained speed. Bullets ripped through the tailgate, the camper shell, slammed into the cab body, pierced the rear window. One passed between Paul and Vic to slam into the dashboard, another scored the roof; two more, somewhat flattened and spent, made holes in the windshield, surrounded by patterns of cracks. The outside mirror shattered on the driver's side.
Frank and Vic had bent forward to lower their profiles, and in scant seconds there was another break in the shooting. "Changing clips," said Frank, grunting the words out as they jounced. No one answered; he looked at Vic and saw that his eyes were closed, in pain or concentration.
The break was longer than he'd expected. The gunmen had had to get replacement clips from the cars, thus the range was more than four hundred yards and widening when the next flurry of bullets was loosed. Paul felt something strike his lower back, but neither stopped nor flinched. More glass fell in on them from behind, and another network of cracks appeared in the windshield, superimposed over one of the others.
Then there was only the sound of the overwound engine, and of their breathing. In scant seconds they were out of the wheat field and on a farm machine lane, then careening through a gap in the multiple tree-rows of a shelterbelt and out onto a blacktop road.
Vic straightened. "Paul, that sure was good driving. We're lucky none of us got hit, or any of our tires." He looked at Paul then. "Are you all right, Paul?"
"Yeah." Paul's voice was hoarse and raspy. "Something hit me in the back, but it doesn't hurt and I don't feel any blood running. Probably a spent bullet, went through too much steel."
"Good." They were approaching the next crossroad. "We lost our monitor," Vic added. "Just keep on straight till the road after this one and turn north. Then Frank will take a turn at the wheel and I'll look at your back."
Hardman had sat doubled over for a minute, his face gray with shock, before jerking his eyes to the screen again. The pickup sped through the wheat field throwing two low rooster tails of loam behind it. His skull felt split, his ears rang intensely, and he was nauseated, but he would not quit now. He gathered his power again and opened himself as he poised to strike.
Then a savage dart struck his mind. He knew his assailant and turned on her, but before he could focus, he was stabbed on another vector, and another, and then a fourth, and more. He struck about wildly, his psyche staggering, but he was battered from every side by lances of fiery intention. He screamed once in pain and rage, then slumped, dead weight.
His housekeeper heard the scream and came running from the kitchen to find him sagging heavily across the console arm. The screen was a meaningless flickering pattern of zigzags. Briefly, she tried to rouse him, talking sharply at him in her Spanish, then hurried to call the gatehouse and tell the guard.
The guard, when he got there, sought a pulse in the fat wrist but wasn't sure whether he was feeling in the right place. He peered beneath a lid, then left the room
Shark already knew; he'd felt it, been rocked by it. Kurt Hardman had died in the skirmish, his heart already weakened by neglect, amphetamines, and general self-abuse. Shark instructed the guard, then grimly called for his pilot; he'd have to fly to Dallas at once and ride the grid himself. He didn't have a lot of experience on it, but The Lords had made sure he could use it.