DEAN KOONTZ

YOUR HEART BELONGS to ME

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Tim and Serena Powers for reasons obvious to anyone who knows them

Epigraph

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned…

—W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

YOUR HEART BELONGS to ME

Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Part 1 Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Part 2 Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight Chapter Thirty-Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty-One Chapter Forty-Two Chapter Forty-Three Part 3 Chapter Forty-Four Chapter Forty-Five Chapter Forty-Six Chapter Forty-Seven Chapter Forty-Eight Chapter Forty-Nine Chapter Fifty Chapter Fifty-One Chapter Fifty-Two Chapter Fifty-Three Chapter Fifty-Four Chapter Fifty-Five Chapter Fifty-Six Chapter Fifty-Seven Keep Reading About the Author Also By Dean Koontz About the Publisher

PART 1

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

—T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”

ONE

Ryan Perry did not know that something in him was broken. At thirty-four, he appeared to be more physically fit than he had been at twenty-four. His home gym was well equipped. A personal trainer came to his house three times a week.

On that Wednesday morning in September, in his bedroom, when he drew open the draperies and saw blue sky as polished as a plate, and the sea blue with the celestial reflection, he wanted surf and sand more than he wanted breakfast.

He went on-line, consulted a surfcast site, and called Samantha.

She must have glanced at the caller-ID readout, because she said, “Good morning, Winky.”

She occasionally called him Winky because on the afternoon that she met him, thirteen months previously, he had been afflicted with a stubborn case of myokymia, uncontrollable twitching of an eyelid.

Sometimes, when Ryan became so obsessed with writing software that he went thirty-six hours without sleep, a sudden-onset tic in his right eye forced him to leave the keyboard and made him appear to be blinking out a frantic distress signal in Morse code.

In that myokymic moment, Samantha had come to his office to interview him for an article that she had been writing for Vanity Fair. For a moment, she had thought he was flirting with her—and flirting clumsily.

During that first meeting, Ryan wanted to ask for a date, but he perceived in her a seriousness of purpose that would cause her to reject him as long as she was writing about him. He called her only after he knew that she had delivered the article.

“When Vanity Fair appears, what if I’ve savaged you?” she had asked.

“You haven’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t deserve to be savaged, and you’re a fair person.”

“You don’t know me well enough to be sure of that.”

“From your interviewing style,” he said, “I know you’re smart, clear-thinking, free of political dogma, and without envy. If I’m not safe with you, then I’m safe nowhere except alone in a room.”

He had not sought to flatter her. He merely spoke his mind.

Having an ear for deception, Samantha recognized his sincerity.

Of the qualities that draw a bright woman to a man, truthfulness is equaled only by kindness, courage, and a sense of humor. She had accepted his invitation to dinner, and the months since then had been the happiest of his life.

Now, on this Wednesday morning, he said, “Pumping six-footers, glassy and epic, sunshine that feels its way deep into your bones.”

“I’ve got a deadline to meet.”

“You’re too young for all this talk about death.”

“Are you riding another train of manic insomnia?”

“Slept like a baby. And I don’t mean in a wet diaper.”

“When you’re sleep-deprived, you’re treacherous on a board.”

“I may be radical, but never treacherous.”

“Totally insane, like with the shark.”

“That again. That was nothing.”

“Just a great white.”

“Well, the bastard bit a huge chunk out of my board.”

“And—what?—you were determined to get it back?”

“I wiped out,” Ryan said, “I’m under the wave, in the murk, grabbin’ for air, my hand closes around what I think is the skeg.”

The skeg, a fixed fin on the bottom of a surfboard, holds the stern of the board in the wave and allows the rider to steer.

What Ryan actually grabbed was the shark’s dorsal fin.

Samantha said, “What kind of kamikaze rides a shark?”

“I wasn’t riding. I was taken for a ride.”

“He surfaced, tried to shake you off, you rode him back down.”

“Afraid to let go. Anyway, it lasted like only twenty seconds.”

“Insomnia makes most people sluggish. It makes you hyper.”

“I hibernated last night. I’m as rested as a bear in spring.”

She said, “In a circus once, I saw a bear riding a tricycle.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It was funnier than watching an idiot ride a shark.”

“I’m Pooh Bear. I’m rested and cuddly. If a shark knocked on the door right now, asked me to go for a ride, I’d say no.”

“I had nightmares about you wrestling that shark.”

“Not wrestling. It was more like ballet. Meet you at the place?”

“I’ll never finish writing this book.”

“Leave the computer on when you go to bed each night. The elves will finish it for you. At the place?”

She sighed in happy resignation. “Half an hour.”

“Wear the red one,” he said, and hung up.

The water would be warm, the day warmer. He wouldn’t need a wet suit.

He pulled on a pair of baggies with a palm-tree motif.

His collection included a pair with a shark pattern. If he wore them, she would kick his ass. Figuratively speaking.

For later, he took a change of clothes on a hanger, and a pair of loafers.

Of the five vehicles in his garage, the customized ’51 Ford Woodie Wagon—anthracite-black with bird’s-eye maple panels—seemed to be best suited to the day. Already stowed in the back, his board protruded past the lifted tailgate windows, skeg up.

At the end of the cobblestone driveway, as he turned left into the street, he paused to look back at the house: gracefully sloping roofs of red barrel tile, limestone-clad walls, bronze windows with panes of beveled glass refracting the sun as if they were jewels.

A maid in a crisp white uniform opened a pair of second-floor balcony doors to air the master bedroom.

One of the landscapers trimmed the jasmine vines that were espaliered on the walls flanking the carved-limestone surround at the main entrance.

In less than a decade, Ryan had gone from a cramped apartment in Anaheim to the hills of Newport Coast, high above the Pacific.

Samantha could take the day off on a whim because she was a writer who, though struggling, could set her own hours. Ryan could take it off because he was rich.

Quick wits and hard work had brought him from nothing to the pinnacle. Sometimes when he considered his origins from his current perch, the distance dizzied him.

As he drove out of the gate-guarded community and descended the hills toward Newport Harbor, where thousands of pleasure boats were docked and moored in the glimmering sun-gilded water, he placed a few business calls.

A year previously, he had stepped down as the chief executive officer of Be2Do, which he had built into the most successful social-networking site on the Internet. As the principal stockholder, he remained on the board of directors but declined to be the chairman.

These days, he devoted himself largely to creative development, envisioning and designing new services to be provided by the company. And he tried to persuade Samantha to marry him.

He knew that she loved him, yet something constrained her from committing to marriage. He suspected pride.

The shadow of his wealth was deep, and she did not want to be lost in it. Although she had not expressed this concern, he knew that she hoped to be able to count herself a success as a writer, as a novelist, so that she could enter the marriage as a creative—if not a financial—equal.

Ryan was patient. And persistent.

Phone calls completed, he transitioned from Pacific Coast Highway by bridge to Balboa Peninsula, which separated the harbor from the sea. Cruising toward the peninsula point, he listened to classic doo-wop, music younger than the Woodie Wagon but a quarter of a century older than he was.

He parked on a tree-lined street of charming homes and carried his board half a block to Newport’s main beach.

The sea poured rhythmic thunder onto the shore.

She waited at “the place,” which was where they had first surfed together, midway between the harbor entrance and the pier.

Her above-garage apartment was a three-minute walk from here. She had come with her board, a beach towel, and a small cooler.

Although he had asked her to wear the red bikini, Samantha wore yellow. He had hoped for the yellow, but if he had asked for it, she would have worn red or blue, or green.

She was as perfect as a mirage, blond hair and golden form, a quiver of light, an alluring oasis on the wide slope of sun-seared sand.

“What’re those sandals?” she asked.

“Stylin’, huh?”

“Are they made from old tires?”

“Yeah. But they’re premium gear.”

“Did you also buy a hat made from a hubcap?”

“You don’t like these?”

“If you have a blowout, does the auto club bring you a new shoe?”

Kicking off the sandals, he said, “Well, I like them.”

“How often do they need to be aligned and balanced?”

Soft and hot, the sand shifted underfoot, but then was compacted and cool where the purling surf worked it like a screed.

As they waded into the sea, he said, “I’ll ditch the sandals if next time you’ll wear the red bikini.”

“You actually wanted this yellow one.”

He repressed his surprise at her perspicacity. “Then why would I ask for the red?”

“Because you only think you can read me.”

“But I’m an open book, huh?”

“Winky, compared to you, Dr. Seuss’s simplest tale is as complex as Dostoyevsky.”

They launched their boards and, prone upon them, paddled out toward the break.

Raising his voice above the swash of the surf, he called to her: “Was that Seuss thing an insult?”

Her silvery laughter stirred in Ryan memories of mermaid tales awash with the mysteries of the deep.

She said, “Not an insult, sweetie. That was a thirteen-word kiss.”

Ryan did not bother to recall and count her words from Winky to Dostoyevsky. Samantha noticed everything, forgot nothing, and was able to recall entire conversations that had occurred months previously.

Sometimes he found her as daunting as she was appealing, which seemed to be a good thing. Samantha would never be predictable or boring.

The consistently spaced waves came like boxcars, four or five at a time. Between these sets were periods of relative calm.

While the sea was slacking, Ryan and Samantha paddled out to the lineup. There, they straddled their boards and watched the first swell of a new set roll toward the break.

From this more intimate perspective, the sea was not as placid and blue as it had appeared from his house in the hills, but as dark as jade and challenging. The approaching swell might have been the arching back of some scaly leviathan, larger than a thousand sharks, born in the deep but rising now to feed upon the sunlit world.

Sam looked at Ryan and grinned. The sun searched her eyes and revealed in them the blue of sky, the green of sea, the delight of being in harmony with millions of tons of water pushed shoreward by storms three thousand miles away and by the moon now looming on the dark side of the earth.

Sam caught the second swell: on two knees, one knee, now standing, swift and clean, away. She rode the crest, then did a floater off the curling lip.

As she slid out of view, down the face of the wave, Ryan thought that the breaker—much bigger than anything in previous sets—had the size and the energy to hollow out and put her in a tube. Good as it gets, Sam would ride it out as smoothly as oil surging through a pipeline.

Ryan looked seaward, timing the next swell, eager to rise and walk the board.

Something happened to his heart. Already quick with anticipation of the ride, the beat suddenly accelerated and began to pound with a force more suited to a moment of high terror than to one of pleasant excitement.

He could feel his pulse throbbing in his ankles, wrists, throat, temples. The tide of blood within his arteries seemed to crescendo in sympathy with the sea that swelled toward him, under him.

The sibilant voice of the water became insistent, sinister.

Clutching the board, abandoning the attempt to rise and ride, Ryan saw the day dim, losing brightness at the periphery. Along the horizon, the sky remained clear yet faded to gray.

Inky clouds spread through the jade sea, as though the Pacific would soon be as black in the morning light as it was on any moonless night.

He was breathing fast and shallow. The very atmosphere seemed to be changing, as if half the oxygen content had been bled out of it, perhaps explaining the graying of the sky.

Never previously had he been afraid of the sea. He was afraid of it now.

The water rose as though with conscious intention, with malice. Clinging to his board, Ryan slid down the hunchbacked swell into the wide trough between waves.

Irrationally, he worried that the trough would become a trench, the trench a vortex. He feared that he would be whirled down into drowning depths.

The board wallowed, bobbed, and Ryan almost rolled off. His strength had left him. His grip had grown weak, as tremulous as that of an old man.

Something bristled in the water, alarming him.

When he realized that those spiky forms were neither shark fins nor grasping tentacles, but were the conceptacles of a knotted mass of seaweed, he was not relieved. If a shark were to appear now, Ryan would be at the mercy of it, unable to evade it or resist.

TWO

As suddenly as the attack came, it passed. Ryan’s storming heart quieted. Blue reclaimed the graying sky. The encroaching darkness in the water receded. His strength returned to him.

He did not realize how long the episode had lasted until he saw that Samantha had ridden her wave to shore and, in the relative calm between sets, had paddled out to him once more.

As she came closer, the concern that creased her brow was also evident in her voice: “Ryan?”

“Just enjoying the moment,” he lied, remaining prone on his board. “I’ll catch one in the next set.”

“Since when are you a mallard?” she asked, by which she meant that he was floating around in the lineup like a duck, like one of those gutless wannabes who soaked all day in the swells just beyond the break point and called it surfing.

“The last two in that set were bigger,” he said. “I have a hunch the next batch might be double overhead, worth waiting for.”

Sam straddled her board and looked out to sea, scanning for the first swell of the new set.

If Ryan read her correctly, she sensed that he was shining her on, and she wondered why.

With his heart steady and his strength recovered, he stopped hugging the board, straddled it, getting ready.

Waiting for the next wave train, he told himself that he had not experienced a physical seizure, but instead merely an anxiety attack. At self-deception, he was as skilled as anyone.

He had no reason to be anxious. His life was sweet, buttered, and sliced for easy consumption.

Focused on far water, Samantha said, “Winky.”

“I see it.”

The sea rose to the morning sun, dark jade and silver, a great shoulder of water shrugging up and rolling smoothly toward the break.

Ryan smelled brine, smelled the iodine of bleeding seaweed, and tasted salt.

“Epic,” Sam called out, sizing the swell.

“Monster,” he agreed.

Instead of rising into a control position, she left the wave to him, her butt on the board, her feet in the water, bait for sharks.

A squadron of gulls streaked landward, shrieking as if to warn those on shore that a behemoth was coming to smash sand castles and swamp picnic hampers.

As the moment of commitment neared, apprehension rose in Ryan, concern that the thrill of the ride might trigger another … episode.

He paddled to catch the wave, got to his feet on the pivot point, arms reaching for balance, fingers spread, palms down, and he caught the break, a perfect peeler that didn’t section on him but instead poured pavement as slick as ice. The moving wave displaced air, and a cool wind rose up the curved wall, pressing against his flattened palms.

Then he was in a tube, a glasshouse, behind the curtain of the breaking wave, shooting the curl, and his apprehension burst like a bubble and was no more.

Using every trick to goose momentum, he emerged from the tube before it collapsed, into the sparkle of sun on water filigreed with foam. The day was so real, so right. He admonished himself, No fear, which was the only way to live.

All morning, into the afternoon, the swells were monoliths. The offshore breeze strengthened, blowing liquid smoke off the lips of the waves.

The beach blanket was not a place to tan. It was for rehab, for massaging the quivers out of overtaxed muscles, for draining sinuses flooded with seawater, for combing bits of kelp and crusted salt out of your hair, for psyching each other into the next session.

Usually, Ryan would want to stay until late afternoon, when the offshore breeze died and the waves stopped hollowing out, when the yearning for eternity—which the ocean represented—became a yearning for burritos and tacos.

By two-thirty, however, during a retreat to the blanket, a pleasant weariness, the kind that follows work well done, overcame him. There was something delicious about this fatigue, a sweetness that made him want to close his eyes and let the sun melt him into sleep. …

As he was swimming effortlessly in an abyss vaguely illuminated by clouds of luminescent plankton, a voice spoke to him out of the deep: “Ryan?”

“Hmmmm?”

“Were you asleep?”

He felt as though he were still asleep when he opened his eyes and saw her face looming over him: beauty of a degree that seemed mythological, radiant eyes the precise shade of a green sea patinaed by the blue of a summer sky, golden hair crowned with a corona of sunlight, goddess on a holiday from Olympus.

“You were asleep,” Samantha said.

“Too much big surf. I’m quashed.”

“You? When have you ever been quashed?”

Sitting up on the blanket, he said, “Had to be a first time.”

“You really want to pack out?”

“I skipped breakfast. We surfed through lunch.”

“There’s chocolate-cherry granola bars in the cooler.”

“Nothing but a slab of beef will revive me.”

They carried the cooler, the blanket, and their boards to the station wagon, stowed everything in back.

Still sodden with sunshine and loose-limbed from being so long in the water, Ryan almost asked Samantha to drive.

More than once, however, she glanced at him speculatively, as if she sensed that his brief nap on the beach blanket was related to the episode at the beginning of the day, when he floated like a mallard in the lineup, his heart exploding. He didn ‘t want to worry her. Besides, there was no reason to worry.

Earlier, he’d had an anxiety attack. But if truth were known, most people probably had them these days, considering the events and the pessimistic predictions that constituted the evening news.

Instead of passing the car keys to Sam, Ryan drove the two blocks to her apartment.

Samantha showered first while Ryan brewed a pitcher of fresh iced tea and sliced two lemons to marinate in it.

Her cozy kitchen had a single large window beyond which stood a massive California pepper tree. The elegant limbs, festooned with weeping fernlike leaves divided into many glossy leaflets, appeared to fill the entire world, creating the illusion that her apartment was a tree house.

The pleasant weariness that had flooded through Ryan on the beach now drained away, and a new vitality welled in him.

He began to think of making love to Samantha. Once the urge arose, it swelled into full-blooded desire.

Hair toweled but damp, she returned to the kitchen, wearing turquoise slacks, a crisp white blouse, and white tennies.

If she had been in the mood, she would have been barefoot, wearing only a silk robe.

For weeks at a time, her libido matched his, and she wanted him frequently. He had noticed that her desire was greater during those periods when she was busiest with her writing and the least inclined to consider his proposal of marriage.

A sudden spell of virtuous restraint was a sign that she was brooding about accepting the engagement ring, as though the prospect of matrimony required that sex be regarded as something too serious, perhaps too sacred, to be indulged in lightly.

Ryan happily accepted each turn toward abstinence when it seemed to indicate that she was on the brink of making a commitment to him. At twenty-eight, she was six years younger than he was, and they had a life of lovemaking ahead.

He poured a glass of iced tea for her, and then he went to take a shower. He started with water nearly as cold as the tea.

In the westering sun, the strawberry trees shed elongated leaf shadows on the flagstone floor of the restaurant patio.

Ryan and Samantha shared a caprese salad and lingered over their first glasses of wine, not in a hurry to order entrees.

The smooth peeling bark of the trees was red, especially so in the condensed light of the slowly declining sun.

“Teresa loved the flowers,” Sam said, referring to her sister.

“What flowers?”

“On these trees. They get panicles of little urn-shaped flowers in the late spring.”

“White and pink,” Ryan remembered.

“Teresa said they look like cascades of tiny bells, wind chimes hung out by fairies.”

Six years previously, Teresa had suffered serious head trauma in a traffic accident. Eventually she had died.

Samantha seldom mentioned her sister. When she spoke of Teresa, she tended to turn inward before much had been said, mummifying her memories in long windings of silence.

Now, as she gazed into the overhanging tree, the expression in her eyes was reminiscent of that look of longing when, straddling her surfboard in the lineup, she studied far water for the first sign of a new set of swells.

Ryan was comfortable with Sam’s occasional silences, which he suspected were always related to thoughts of her sister, even when she had not mentioned Teresa.

They had been identical twins.

To better understand Sam, Ryan had read about twins who had been separated by tragedy. Apparently the survivor’s grief was often mixed with unjustified guilt.

Some said the intense bond between identicals, especially between sisters, could not be broken even by death. A few insisted they still felt the presence of the other, akin to how an amputee often feels sensations in his phantom leg.

Samantha’s contemplative silence gave Ryan an opportunity to study and admire her with a forthrightness that was not possible when she was aware of his stare.

Watching her, he was nailed motionless by admiration, unable to lift his wineglass, or at least disinterested in it, his eyes alone in motion, traveling the contours of her face and the graceful line of her throat.

His life was a pursuit of perfection, of which perhaps the world held none.

Sometimes he imagined that he came close to it when writing lines of code for software. An exquisite digital creation, however, was as cold as a mathematical equation. The most fastidious software architecture was an object of mere precision, not of perfection, for it could not evoke an intense emotional response.

In Samantha Reach, he’d found a beauty so close to perfection that he could convince himself this was his quest fulfilled.

Gazing into the tree but focused on something far beyond the red geometry of those branches, Sam said, “After the accident, she was in a coma for a month. When she came out of it … she wasn’t the same.”

Ryan was kept silent by the smoothness of her skin. This was the first he had heard of Teresa’s coma. Yet the radiance of Sam’s face, in the caress of the late sun, rendered him incapable of comment.

“She still had to be fed through a tube in her stomach.”

The only leaf shadows that touched Samantha’s face were braided across her golden hair and brow, as though she wore the wreath of Nature’s approval.

“The doctors said she was in a permanent vegetative state.”

Her gaze lowered through the branches and fixed on a cruciform of sunlight that, shimmering on the table, was projected by a beam passing through her wineglass.

“I never believed the doctors,” she said. “Teresa was still complete inside her body, trapped but still Teresa. I didn’t want them to take out the feeding tube.”

She raised her eyes to meet his, and he had to make of this a conversation.

“But they took it out anyway?” he asked.

“And starved her to death. They said she wouldn’t feel anything. Supposedly the brain damage assured that she’d have no pain.”

“But you think she suffered.”

“I know she did. During the last day, the last night, I sat with her, holding her hand, and I could feel her looking at me even though she never opened her eyes.”

He did not know what to say to that.

Samantha picked up her glass of wine, causing the cross of light to morph into an arrow that briefly quivered like a compass needle seeking true north in Ryan’s eyes.

“I’ve forgiven my mother for a lot of things, but I’ll never forgive her for what she did to Teresa.”

As Samantha took a sip of wine, Ryan said, “But I thought … your mother was in the same accident.”

“She was.”

“I was under the impression she died in the crash, too. Rebecca. Was that her name?”

“She is dead. To me. Rebecca’s buried in an apartment in Las Vegas. She walks and talks and breathes, but she’s dead all right.”

Samantha’s father had abandoned the family before the twins were two. She had no memory of him.

Feeling that Sam should hold fast to what little family she had, Ryan almost encouraged her to give her mother a chance to earn redemption. But he kept silent on the issue, because Sam had his sympathy and his understanding.

His grandparents and hers—all long dead—were of the generation that defeated Hitler and won the Cold War. Their fortitude and their rectitude had been passed along, if at all, in a diluted form to the next generation.

Ryan’s parents, no less than Sam’s, were of that portion of the post-war generation that rejected the responsibilities of tradition and embraced entitlement. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was the parent, that his mother and father were the children.

Regardless of the consequences of their behavior and decisions, they would see no need for redemption. Giving them the chance to earn it would only offend them. Sam’s mother was most likely of that same mind-set.

Samantha put down her glass, but the sun made nothing of it this time.

After a hesitation, as Ryan poured more wine for both of them, he said, “Funny how something as lovely as strawberry-tree flowers can peel the scab off a bad memory.”

“Sorry.”

“No need to be.”

“Such a nice day. I didn’t mean to bring it down. Are you as ferociously hungry as I am?”

“Bring me the whole steer,” he said.

In fact, they ordered just the filet mignon, no horns or hooves.

As the descending sun set fire to the western sky, strings of miniature white lights came on in the strawberry trees. On all the tables were candles in amber cups of faceted glass, and busboys lit them.

The ordinary patio had become a magical place, and Samantha was the centerpiece of the enchantment.

By the time the waiter served the steaks, Sam had found the lighter mood that had characterized the rest of the day, and Ryan joined her there.

After the first bite of beef, she raised her wineglass in a toast. “Hey, Dotcom, this one’s to you.”

Dotcom was another nickname that she had for him, used mostly when she wanted to poke fun at his public image as a business genius and tech wizard.

“Why to me?” he asked.

“Today you finally stepped down from the pantheon and revealed that you’re at best a demigod.”

Pretending indignation, he said, “I haven’t done any such thing. I’m still turning the wheel that makes the sun rise in the morning and the moon at night.”

“You used to take the waves until they surrendered and turned mushy. Today you’re beached on a blanket by two-thirty.”

“Did you consider that it might have been boredom, that the swells just weren’t challenging enough for me?”

“I considered it for like two seconds, but you were snoring as if you’d been plenty challenged.”

“I wasn’t sleeping. I was meditating.”

“You and Rip Van Winkle.” After they had assured the attentive waiter that their steaks were excellent, Samantha said, “Seriously, you were okay out there today, weren’t you?”

“I’m thirty-four, Sam. I guess I can’t always thrash the waves like a kid anymore.”

“It’s just—you looked a little gray there.”

He raised a hand to his hair. “Gray where?”

“Your pretty face.”

He grinned. “You think it’s pretty?”

“You can’t keep pulling those thirty-six-hour sessions at the keyboard and then go right out and rip the ocean like you’re the Big Kahuna.”

“I’m not dying, Sam. I’m just aging gracefully.”

He woke in absolute darkness, with the undulant motion of the sea beneath him. Disoriented, he thought for a moment that he was lying faceup on a surfboard, beyond the break, under a sky in which every star had been extinguished.

The hard rapid knocking of his heart alarmed him.

When Ryan felt the surface under him, he realized that it was a bed, not a board. The undulations were not real, merely perceived, a yawing dizziness.

“Sam,” he said, but then remembered that she was not with him, that he was home, alone in his bedroom.

He tried to reach the lamp on the nightstand … but could not lift his arm.

When he tried to sit up, pain bloomed in his chest.

THREE

Ryan felt as though concrete blocks were stacked on his chest. Although mild, the pain frightened him. His heart raced so fast that the beats could not be counted.

He counseled himself to remain calm, to be still, to let the seizure pass, as it had passed when he had been floating on his surfboard.

The difference between then and now was the pain. The racing heart, the weakness, and the dizziness were as disturbing as before, but the added element of pain denied him the delusion that this was nothing more than an anxiety attack.

Even as a small child, Ryan had not been afraid of the dark. Now darkness itself seemed to be the weight on his chest. The black infinity of the universe, the thick atmosphere of the earthly night, the blinding gloom in the bedroom pressed each upon the next, and all upon him, relentlessly bending his breastbone inward until his heart knocked against it as if seeking to be let out of him and into eternity.

He grew desperate for light.

When he tried to sit up, he could not. The pressure held him down.

He discovered that he could push against the mattress with his heels and elbows, gradually hitching backward, three feather pillows compacting into a ramp that elevated his head and shoulders. His skull rapped against the headboard.

The weight on his chest forced him to take shallow inhalations. Each time he exhaled, a sound thinner than a whimper also escaped him, offending the black room like a nail drawn down a chalkboard.

After he had hitched into a reclining position, not sitting up but more than halfway there, some strength returned to him. He could lift his arms.

With his left hand, he reached blindly for the bedside lamp. He located the bronze base, and his fingers slid along a cast-bronze column with a bamboo motif.

Before he found the switch, the ache in his chest intensified and swiftly spread to his throat, as if the agony were ink and his flesh an absorbent blotter.

The pain seemed to be something that he had swallowed or was regurgitating intact. It blocked his airway, restricted breathing, and pinched his cry of shock into a half note followed by a hiss.

He fell from bed. He did not know how it happened. The bed became the floor, leaving him with no awareness of the fall, with only a recognition that mattress had been replaced by carpet.

He was not alone in the house; but he might as well have been. At this hour, Lee and Kay Ting, the couple who managed the estate, were asleep in their quarters, on the lowest of the three floors, in the wing of the house farthest from the one that contained Ryan’s third-floor master suite.

In the same way that he had fallen unawares from bed, he came to the realization that he was dragging himself across the floor, his torso raised on his forearms, legs twitching as feebly as the broken appendages of a half-crushed beetle.

Rapidly intensifying, the pain had spread from his throat into his jaw. He seemed to have bitten on a nail so hard that the point had penetrated between two teeth and into the mandible.

Suddenly he remembered that the house intercom was part of the telephone system. He could buzz Lee and Kay by pressing 1-1-1. They could be here in a minute or two.

He did not know in which direction lay the bed, the nightstand, the phone. He had become disoriented.

The room was large but not vast. He should have been able to find his way in the dark.

But pain seared, vertigo spun, weakness drained, fear twisted his thoughts until he had no capacity for calculation. Although the fall from bed to floor was only a couple of feet, he seemed to have been cast down from a great height, all grace pulverized on impact, and all hope.

His eyes were stung by hot tears, and his throat burned with refluxed stomach acid, and the balefire in his jaw would surely consume the bone and collapse his face.

The darkness spun and tilted. He could not crawl farther, but could only clutch the carpet as though gravity might be repealed and he might be whirled away, weightless, into a void.

His heart hammered faster than he could count its blows, at least two hundred a minute.

Pain spread from his throat into his left arm, radiated across his shoulder and down his back.

A prince of the Internet, richer than most kings, he lay now as prostrate as any commoner abashed in the presence of royalty, at the mercy of his body, mere clay.

The black ocean swelled under him, and he had nothing to which he could hold, neither a surfboard nor the dorsal fin of a shark. The sea was infinite, and he was as insignificant as a tracery of foam on a single wave. A great mass of water shouldered up, and he slid down its back into a trough, and the trough became an abyss, the abyss a vortex that swallowed him.

FOUR

The alarm-clock feature on the TV had been set for seven in the morning. The volume remained low, and Ryan woke slowly to murmuring voices, to music scored for drama.

The glow from the screen did not fully relieve the darkness. As the value of light changed in a scene and as figures moved, phantoms throbbed and flickered through the bedroom.

Ryan lay on the floor, in the fetal position, facing the screen. William Holden, many years after Sunset Boulevard, was in an intense conversation with a lovely young woman.

In thirty-four years, Ryan had experienced only two hangovers, but he seemed to be suffering a third. Headache. Eyes crusted shut, vision blurry. Dry, sour mouth.

Initially he could not recall the events of the previous evening or remember what possessed him to go to sleep on the floor.

Curiously, the mystery of his circumstances intrigued him less than the events on the television: the older man, the younger woman, worried talk of war. …

The once-sharp edges of his mind were worn, his thoughts a shapeless stream of quicksilver. Even when his vision cleared, he couldn’t follow the movie or grasp the character relationships.

Yet he felt compelled to watch, haunted by the feeling that he had awakened to this movie not by accident but by the design of Fate. Here to be deciphered was a warning about his future that he must understand if he were to save himself.

This extraordinary conviction grew until he was impelled to rise to his knees, to his feet. He moved closer to the large TV.

As the fine hairs prickled on the nape of his neck, his heart quickened. The thudding in his breast knocked into memory the much more furious pounding to which he had awakened in the night, and abruptly he recalled every detail of the terrifying seizure.

He turned away from the TV, switched on a lamp. He stared at his trembling hands, closed them into fists, opened them once more, half expecting some degree of paralysis, but finding none.

In his bathroom, black granite, gold onyx, and stainless steel were reflected in a wilderness of mirrors. An infinite line of Ryan Perrys faced him, all of them gray and haggard and grim with dread.

As never before, he was aware of the skull beneath the skin, each curve and plane and hollow of bone, the perpetual death’s-head grin concealed behind every expression that his face assumed.

Shaved, showered, and dressed, Ryan found his estate manager, Lee Ting, in the garage.

This large subterranean space provided eighteen parking stalls. The ceiling was ten feet high, to accommodate delivery trucks and—if he should ever want one—a motor home.

Golden ceramic tile, a kind used in automobile showrooms, paved the floor. Glossy white tile covered the walls. The brightwork on the Woodie and other classic vehicles sparkled in the beams of pin spots.

Ryan had always before thought the garage was beautiful, even elegant. Now the cold tile reminded him of a mausoleum.

In the corner workshop, Lee Ting was polishing a custom-made license-plate frame for one of the cars.

He was a small man but strong. He appeared to be cast from bronze not yet patinaed, and prominent veins swelled in his hands.

At fifty, his life was defined by parenthood denied, his hope of family thwarted. Kay Ting twice conceived, but a subsequent uterine infection left her sterile.

Their first child had been a daughter. At the age of two, she died of influenza. Their second, a son, was also gone.

The sight of certain young children elicited from them the most tender smiles, even as their eyes glistened with the memory of loss.

When the power buffer clicked off, Ryan said, “Lee, do you have a staff meeting this morning or appointments with anyone?”

Surprised, Lee turned. His face brightened, his chin lifted, and a cheerful expectation came into him, as though nothing pleased him more than the opportunity to be of good service.

Ryan suspected this was in fact the case. All the strivings and the particular satisfactions of raising a family, denied to Lee, were now expressed in his job.

Putting aside the license-plate frame, Lee said, “Good morning, Mr. Perry. I have nothing scheduled that Kay can’t cover for me. What do you need?”

“I was hoping you could drive me to a doctor’s appointment.”

Concern diminished the arc of Lee’s smile. “Is something wrong, sir?”

“Nothing much. I just feel off, a little nauseous. I’d prefer not to drive myself.”

Most men of Ryan’s wealth employed a chauffeur. He loved cars too much to delegate his driving.

Lee Ting clearly knew this need for a driver was proof of more than mild nausea. He at once snared a key from the key safe and went with Ryan to the Mercedes S600.

A tenderness in Lee’s manner and a wounded expression in his eyes suggested that he regarded his boss as more than an employer. He was, after all, just old enough to have been Ryan’s father.

The twelve-cylinder Mercedes seemed to float on a cushion of air, and little road noise reached them. Although the sedan rode like a dream, Ryan knew that it carried him toward a nightmare.

FIVE

Ryan’s internist had a concierge practice limited to three hundred patients. He guaranteed an appointment within one day of a request, but he saw Ryan only three hours after receiving his call.

From an examination room on the fourteenth floor, Ryan could see Newport Harbor, the Pacific Ocean, distant ships bound for unknown shores.

His doctor, Forest Stafford, had already examined him, and a med tech had administered an electrocardiogram. Then Ryan had gone down to a medical imaging company on the third floor, where they had conducted an echocardiogram.

At the fourteenth-floor window, he waited now for Dr. Stafford to return with an interpretation of the tests.

An armada of large white clouds sailed slowly north, but their shadows were iron-black upon the sea, pressing the surf flat.

The door opened behind Ryan. Feeling as weightless as a cloud, and half afraid that in an angled light he would cast no shadow, he turned away from the window.

Forest Stafford’s powerful square body was in contrast to his rectangular countenance, in which his features were elongated, as if affected by a face-specific gravity that had not distorted the rest of him. Because he was a sensitive man, the deforming force, at work for years, might have been the pain of his patients.

Leaning against the counter that contained the hand sink, the physician said, “I imagine you want me to cut to the chase.”

Ryan made no move to a chair, but stood with his back to the window and to the sea that he loved. “You know me, Forry.”

“It wasn’t a heart attack.”

“Nothing that simple,” Ryan guessed.

“Your heart is hypertrophic. Enlarged.”

Ryan at once argued his case, as if Forry were a judge who, properly persuaded, could declare him healthy. “But … I’ve always kept fit, eaten right.”

“A vitamin B1 deficiency can sometimes be involved, but in your case I doubt this is related to diet or exercise.”

“Then what?”

“Could be a congenital condition only now expressing itself. Or excessive alcohol consumption, but that’s not you.”

The room had not suddenly gone cold, nor had the temperature plunged in the day beyond the window. Nevertheless, a set of chills rose at the back of Ryan’s neck and broke along the shoals of his spine.

The physician counted off possible causes: “Scarring of the endocardium, amyloidosis, poisoning, abnormal cell metabolism—”

“Poisoning? Who would want to poison me?”

“No one. It’s not poisoning. But to get an accurate diagnosis, I want you to have a myocardial biopsy.”

“That doesn’t sound like fun.”

“It’s uncomfortable but not painful. I’ve spoken with Samar Gupta, an excellent cardiologist. He can see you for a preliminary exam this afternoon—and perform the biopsy in the morning.”

“That doesn’t give me much time to think,” Ryan said.

“What is there to think about?”

“Life … death … I don’t know.”

“We can’t decide on treatment without a definitive diagnosis.”

Ryan hesitated. Then: “Is it treatable?”

“It may be,” said Forry.

“I wish you’d just said yes.”

“Believe me, Dotcom, I wish I could just say it.”

Before Forest Stafford was Ryan’s internist, they had met at a classic-car rally and had struck up a friendship. Jane Stafford, Forry’s wife, bonded to Samantha as if she were a daughter; and Dotcom had since been more widely used.

“Samantha,” Ryan whispered.

Only upon speaking her name did he realize that the preliminary diagnosis had pinned his thoughts entirely on the pivot point of this twist of fate, on just the sharp fact of his mortality.

Now his mind slipped loose of the pin. His thoughts raced.

The prospect of impending death had at first been an abstraction that inspired an icy anxiety. But when he thought of what he would lose with his life, when he considered the specific losses—Samantha, the sea, the blush of dawn, the purple twilight—anxiety quickened into dread.

Ryan said, “Don’t tell Sam.”

“Of course not.”

“Or even Jane. I know she wouldn’t mean to tell Sam. But Sam would sense something wrong, and get it out of her.”

Like wax retreating from a flame, the mournful lines of Forry Stafford’s face softened into sorrow. “When will you tell her?”

“After the biopsy. When I have all the facts.”

With a sigh, Forry said, “Some days I wish I’d gone into dentistry.”

“Tooth decay is seldom fatal.”

“Or even gingivitis.”

Forry sat down on the wheeled stool, where he usually perched to listen to a patient’s complaints and to make notes in his files.

Ryan settled into the only chair. After a while he said, “You made a decision on the ’40 Mercury convertible?”

“Yeah. Just now. I’m gonna buy it.”

“Edelbrock two-carb manifold? That right?”

“Yeah. You should hear it.”

“What’s it stand on?” Ryan asked.

“Nineteen-sixty Imperials. Fifteen-inch.”

“Chopped?”

“Four inches.”

“That must give it a cool windshield profile.”

“Very cool,” Forry confirmed.

“You gonna work on it?”

“I’ve got some ideas.”

“I think I’d like to have a ’32 deuce coupe,” Ryan said.

“Five-window?”

“Maybe a three-window highboy.”

“I’ll help you find it. We’ll scout some shows.”

“I’d like that.”

“Me too.”

They sat in silence for a moment.

The examination room had a white acoustic-tile ceiling, pale-blue walls, a gray vinyl-tile floor.

On one wall hung a print of a painting by Childe Hassam. Titled The White Dory, Gloucester, it was dated 1895.

On pale water, in a white boat sat a fair woman. She wore a long white skirt, a pleated and ruffled pink blouse, and a straw boater.

Delicate, desirable, she would have been a handsome wife in those days when marriages lasted a lifetime. Ryan was overcome with a strange yearning to have known her, to have heard her voice, to have tasted her kiss, but she was lost somewhere in time, as he might soon be, as well.

“Shit,” he said.

Forry said, “Ditto.”

SIX

Dr. Samar Gupta had a round brown face and eyes the color of molasses. His voice was lilting, his diction precise, his slender hands impeccably manicured.

After reviewing the echocardiogram and examining Ryan, Gupta explained how a myocardial biopsy was performed. He made use of a large poster of the cardiovascular system.

Confronted with a colorful depiction of the interior of the human heart, Ryan found his mind escaping to the painting of the woman in the white dory, in Forry Stafford’s examination room.

Dr. Gupta seemed unnaturally calm, every movement efficient, every gesture economical. His resting pulse was probably a measured fifty beats per minute. Ryan envied the physician’s serenity and his health.

“Please be at the hospital admissions desk at six o’clock tomorrow morning,” the cardiologist said. “Do not eat or drink anything after midnight.”

Ryan said, “I don’t like sedation, the loss of control.”

“You’ll be given a mild sedative to relax you, but you’ll remain awake to follow instructions during the procedure.”

“The risks … ”

“Are as I explained. But none of my biopsies has ever involved … complications.”

Ryan was surprised to hear himself say, “I trust your skill, Dr. Gupta, but I’m still afraid.”

In business, Ryan had never expressed uncertainty, let alone fear. He allowed no one to see any weakness in him.

“From the day we’re born, Ryan, we should all be afraid, but not of dying.”

In the plush backseat of the Mercedes S600, on the way home, Ryan realized that he did not understand the cardiologist’s last comment.

From the day we’re born, Ryan, we should all be afraid, but not of dying.

In the office, in the moment, the words had seemed wise and appropriate. But Ryan’s fear and his desire to quell it had led him to hear that statement as a reassurance, when in fact it was not.

Now the physician’s words seemed mysterious, even cryptic, and disturbing.

Behind the wheel of the sedan, Lee Ting glanced repeatedly at the rearview mirror. Ryan pretended not to notice his houseman’s concern.

Lee could not know which of the many physicians Ryan had visited in Dr. Gupta’s building, and he remained too discreet to ask. Yet he was an acutely perceptive man who sensed his employer’s solemnity.

In the west, the phoenix palms and the rooftops were gilded with sunlight. The attenuated shadows of those trees and buildings, of lampposts and pedestrians, reached eastward, as if the entire coast yearned for nightfall.

On those rare occasions when Lee previously served as chauffeur, he had driven sedately, as if he were decades older than his years and part of some royal procession. This time, he exceeded speed limits with the rest of the traffic and crossed intersections on the yellow light.

He seemed to know that his employer needed the comfort of home, refuge.

SEVEN

En route from Dr. Gupta’s office, Ryan called Kay Ting and placed an order for dinner that would require her to go to his favorite restaurant to get takeout.

Later, using the elevator, the Tings brought a dining-service cart to the third-floor sitting room that was part of the master suite. They put up the leaves to expand the cart into a table and smoothed out the white tablecloth.

Presented for Ryan’s pleasure were three dishes of homemade ice cream—dark chocolate, black cherry, and limoncello—each nestled in a larger bowl of cracked ice. There were also servings of flourless chocolate cake, a lemon tart, a peanut-butter tart, strawberries in sour cream with a pot of brown sugar, a selection of exotic cookies, and bottles of root beer in an ice bucket.

Because Ryan allowed himself dessert only once or twice a week, the Tings were curious about this uncharacteristic indulgence.

He pretended to be celebrating the conclusion of a particularly rewarding business deal, but he knew they did not believe him. The arrayed sweets suggested the last meal of a condemned man who, though thirty-four, had never finished growing up.

Eating alone, sitting at the wheeled table, Ryan sampled a series of old movies on the big-screen plasma TV. He sought comedies, but none of them struck him as funny.

Calories no longer mattered, or cholesterol, and at first this indulgence without guilt was so novel that he enjoyed himself. Soon, however, the adolescent smorgasbord grew cloying, too rich.

To thumb his nose at Death, he ate more than he wanted. The root beer began to seem like syrup.

He wheeled the cart out of the master suite, left it in the hall, and used the intercom to tell Kay that he had finished.

Earlier, the Tings turned down the bed and plumped the pillows.

When Ryan put on pajamas and slipped between the sheets, insomnia tormented him. If fear of death had not kept him awake, the tides of sugar in his blood would have made him restless.

Barefoot, hoping to walk off his anxiety, he went roaming through the house.

Beyond the large windows lay the luminous panorama of Orange County’s many cities on the vast flats below. The ambient glow was sufficient to allow him to navigate the house without switching on a lamp.

Shortly before midnight, lights in a back hall led him to the large butler’s pantry, where china and glassware were stored in mahogany cabinets. He heard voices in the adjacent kitchen.

Although additional members of the household staff were at work during the day, the Tings were the only live-ins. Yet Ryan could not at once identify the speakers as Lee and Kay, because they conversed quietly, almost whispering.

Usually, the Tings would be in bed at this hour. Their workday began at eight o’clock in the morning.

Although throughout his life Ryan had not once been troubled by superstition, he was now overcome by a sense of the uncanny. He felt suddenly that his house hid secrets, that within these rooms were realms unknown, and that for his well-being, he must learn all that was being concealed from him.

Putting his left ear to the crack between the jamb and the swinging door, he strained to hear what was being said.

The spacious kitchen had been designed to function for caterers when large parties required the preparation of elaborate buffets. The low voices softly reverberated off the extensive granite countertops and off the many stainless-steel appliances.

Risking discovery, he eased the door open an inch. The voices did not become recognizable, nor did the murmurs and whispers resolve from sibilant sounds into words.

Ryan did, however, additionally hear the quiet clink and ping of dishes, which seemed curious. Lee and Kay would have washed the dinnerware hours ago, and if they had wanted a late snack, they would have prepared it in the kitchenette that was part of their private suite.

He heard also a peculiar grinding noise, soft and rhythmic. This was not an everyday sound, but vaguely familiar and—for reasons he could not define—sinister.

Gradually his eavesdropping began to seem foolish. The only thing sinister in his house was his imagination, which had been dizzied and led into dark byways by the specter of his mortality.

Nevertheless, when he thought to press the swinging door inward and learn the identity of those in the kitchen, fear swelled in him. His heart abruptly clopped as hard as hooves on stone, and so fast that all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse might have been approaching.

He eased the door shut, backed away from it.

With his right hand over his heart and his left hand against a cabinet to steady himself, he waited for another seizure to sweep his legs out from under him and leave him helpless on the floor.

The butler’s pantry went dark around him.

Ryan might have thought he’d gone blind, except for the lights in the hallway, beyond the open door by which he had entered.

Past the closed swinging door, lights had been extinguished in the kitchen. A wall switch in that room also controlled the pantry.

Now the hallway fell into darkness.

The windowless pantry could not have been blacker if it had been a padded silk-lined clamshell of mortuary bronze.

Able to hear nothing above the noise of his treacherous heart, Ryan became convinced that someone approached, someone whose vision was as keen in this perfect gloom as was the vision of a cat prowling in moonlight. He waited for a hand to be laid on his shoulder, or for a stranger’s cold fingers to be pressed against his lips.

The weight of his heart insisted that he sit on the floor. His knees buckled, and he slid down the face of a cabinet, the drawer pulls gouging his back.

Minutes passed during which the riot in his breast failed to accelerate into full-blown anarchy, and in fact gradually a normal beat was reestablished, a measured rhythm.

His weakness abated, and with the return of his strength, his fear soured into humiliation.

The drawer pulls became handholds by which Ryan drew himself to his feet. He felt his way through the clinging darkness to the swinging door.

There he listened to the kitchen. No murmurs, no whispers, no clink or ping, no soft but ominous grinding noise.

He passed through the door, eased it shut, and stood with his back to it.

To his right, above the primary sinks and the flanking counters, were windows facing west. The glow of the Newport Beach lowlands and the moon above the sea defined the panes.

He dared the light switch and found that he was alone.

In addition to the door to the pantry, the big kitchen had three other exits: the first to a patio, the second to the breakfast room, and the last to the back hall. The breakfast room also offered a door to the patio and another to the hallway.

Surely, the voices had been those of Lee and Kay. They had been engaged on some mundane task, unaware that he was in the butler’s pantry.

But with Ryan supposedly asleep in his bedroom one floor above and at the farther end of the big house, why had the Tings been whispering?

At each end of the kitchen, as at other points throughout the house, Crestron panels were embedded in the wall. He touched one, and the screen brightened. From this, he could control the lighting, the through-house audio, the heating and cooling, and other systems.

He selected the security display and saw that according to established routine, the Tings had engaged the perimeter alarm. No intruders could have entered the house without triggering a siren and a recorded voice identifying the breach point.

Twenty exterior cameras provided views of the grounds. He cycled through them. Although the night-vision technology offered different clarity from camera to camera, depending on ambient-light conditions, he saw no prowlers on his property, no motion other than the darting paleness of an occasional moth.

He returned to the master suite, but not to bed. In an alcove, off the sitting room where he had taken dinner, stood an amboina-wood Art Deco desk, circa 1928. He sat there, but not to work.

Lee and Kay Ting had been employed here two years. They were talented, dedicated, and reliable.

Their backgrounds had been thoroughly investigated by Wilson Mott, a former homicide detective, now a security consultant, to whom Ryan turned for all matters that were not directly related to his company, Be2Do.

Yet Forry Stafford had said something that replayed in memory: Scarring of the endocardium, amyloidosis, poisoning …

With every repetition, Forry’s remembered voice seemed to place a more ominous emphasis on the word poisoning, even though he had not considered it a possibility in Ryan’s case.

For a man who had been healthy all his life, not just healthy but vigorous, sudden serious heart disease seemed to require an explanation beyond the genetic disposition or the malfunctioning of his body. A life of struggle and arduous competition had taught him that in this world were people whose motives were suspect and whose methods were unscrupulous.

Poison.

A soft paradiddle drew his attention to the west window. The noise ceased the moment that he turned his head to seek the source.

The steely light of the scimitar moon failed to reveal what had tapped the glass. Most likely the visitor had been only a moth or some other nocturnal insect.

He turned his attention to his hands, which were fisted on the desk. Earlier, during the seizure, his heart had felt as if it were tightly held in a cruel fist.

Again, a noise arose at the window, less a sound of something tapping, more the soft insistent rapping of knuckles sheathed in a lambskin glove.

He was on the third floor. No balcony lay beyond this window, nothing but a sheer fall to the lawn. No one could be at those moonlit panes, seeking his attention.

The condition of his heart had affected his mind, rattling his usual confidence. Even something as harmless as a moth could set a quiet fear fluttering through him.

He refused to look again at the window, for to do so seemed to invite a thousand fears to follow. His resistance was rewarded, and the faint tap turned feeble, faded into a persistent silence.

Poison.

His thoughts turned from imagined threats to real ones, to those people he had known, in business, whose greed and envy and ambition had led them to embrace immoral methods.

Ryan had earned his fortune without sharp practice, honestly. Nevertheless, he had made enemies. Some people did not like to lose, even if they lost by their own faults and miscalculations.

After much thought, he made a list of five names.

Among the phone numbers he had for Wilson Mott was a special cell to which the detective responded personally, regardless of the day or hour. Only two or three of Mott’s wealthiest clients possessed the number. Ryan had never abused it.

He hesitated to place the call. But intuition told him that he was snared in an extraordinary web of deceit, and that he needed more help than physicians could supply. He keyed in the seven digits.

When Mott answered, sounding as crisp and alert as he did at any more reasonable hour of the day, Ryan identified himself but neither mentioned the five names on his list nor suggested further background research on the Tings, as he had intended. Instead, he said something that so surprised him, he rendered himself speechless after the first sentence that he spoke.

“I want you to find a woman named Rebecca Reach.”

EIGHT

Rebecca Reach. Samantha’s mother.

Ryan had learned only the previous evening, at dinner with Sam, that her mother was alive. For a year, she had allowed him to think that Rebecca had died.

No, that was unfair. Samantha had not misled him. He had assumed Rebecca was dead merely from what little Samantha said of her.

Evidently mother and daughter were so estranged that they did not speak and likely never would. She is dead. To me, Samantha had said.

He could understand why, after Rebecca had pulled the plug on disabled Teresa, Samantha had wanted to close a door on the memories of her lost twin sister and on her mother, whom she felt had betrayed them.

“Do you have anything besides the name?” asked Wilson Mott.

“Las Vegas,” Ryan said. “Rebecca Reach apparently lives in an apartment in Las Vegas.”

“Is that R-e-a-c-h?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the context, Mr. Perry?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“What discovery might you be hoping for?”

“I’m hoping for nothing. Just a general background on the woman. And an address. A phone number.”

“I assume you do not want us to speak to her directly.”

“That’s right. Discretion, please.”

“Perhaps by five o’clock tomorrow,” Mott said.

“Five o’clock will be fine. I’m busy in the morning and early afternoon, anyway.”

Ryan hung up, not sure if what he had done was intuitively brilliant or stupid. He did not know what he expected to learn that would have any application to his current crisis.

All he knew was that he had acted now as often he had done in business, trusting in hunches based on reason. His instincts had made him rich.

If Samantha learned of this, she might think he was unacceptably suspicious, even faithless. With luck, she would never have to know what he had done.

Ryan returned to bed. He tuned the TV to a classic film, Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, then switched off the bedside lamp.

Reclining against a pile of feather pillows, he watched the movie without seeing it.

He had never asked Wilson Mott to run a background check on Samantha. Generally, he reserved such investigations for potential employees.

Besides, she had come to him on assignment for a major magazine, a writer of experience and some critical reputation. He had seen no reason to vet her further when her bona fides proved to be in order and when she had been likely to spend no more than a few hours with him.

Over the years, he had dealt with uncountable people in the media. They were mostly harmless, occasionally armed but then with nothing more dangerous than a bias that justified, in their minds, misquoting him.

If something about Rebecca Reach eventually raised suspicions, however, Mott might have to conduct a deep background investigation on Samantha.

Ryan was disappointed—not in Sam, for there was yet no reason to reconsider her, but in himself. He loved being with her. He loved her. He did not want to believe that his judgment in this instance had been poor, that he had failed to see she was someone other than who she appeared to be.

Worse, he was dismayed by how quickly his fear led him to doubt her. Until this day, the only crises with which he had dealt were business problems—capital shortfalls, delayed product roll-outs, hostile-takeover bids. Now he faced an existential threat, and his justifiable fear of incapacitation and death had coiled into a viper-eyed paranoia that looked less to the weakness of his flesh than to the possibility of enemies with agendas.

Disconcerted if not embarrassed to be so enthralled by fear, he considered calling Wilson Mott to cancel the background workup on Rebecca Reach.

But Forry Stafford had raised the possibility of poisoning. If that was a potential cause of Ryan’s condition, prudence required him to consider it.

He did not touch the phone.

After a while, he switched off the TV.

He could not sleep. In a few hours, the cardiologist, Samar Gupta, would pluck three tiny pieces of tissue from Ryan’s heart. His life depended on what those samples revealed. If the diagnosis was not good, he would have plenty of time to sleep; he would have eternity.

Out of the darkness and morbid silence issued a faint tapping at a new window, muffled by draperies; this window or that—he could not tell which.

When he raised his head to listen, the insistent moth or the flying beetle, or the hand in the lambskin glove, ceased to rap.

Each time he returned his head to the pillow, silence ensued but was not sustained. Sooner or later came a bump and a bump and a bump-bump-bump: muffled, toneless, dull, dead, and flat.

He could have gone to the windows, one at a time, and pulled open the draperies to catch the noisemaker in the act. Instead, he told himself that the muted tapping was imagined, and he turned his mind away from it, toward the more intimate and troubling rhythms of his heart.

He recognized a certain cowardice in this denial. He sensed that on some level he knew who tapped for his attention, and knew that to pull back the draperies and confront this visitor would be the end of him.

NINE

The moon was down, the sky still dark that Friday morning when Ryan set out for the hospital. The urban glow obscured many stars, but to the west, the sea and shore were one and black and vast.

In spite of the fact that he might have a seizure while behind the wheel, he risked driving. He preferred that Lee Ting not know he was undergoing a myocardial biopsy.

He told himself that he didn’t want people who worked for him or who were otherwise close to him to worry. But in fact he did not want to give an enemy, if one existed, the satisfaction—and advantage—of knowing that he was weakened and vulnerable.

As he walked alone through the hospital parking garage, where the sorcerous-sour yellow light polished the carapaces of the cars into iridescent beetle shells, he had the eerie feeling that he was home and sleeping, that this place and the test to come were all moments of a dream within a dream.

From the out-patient admitting desk, an orderly showed him the way to the cardiac diagnostics laboratory.

The head cardiology nurse, Kyra Whipset, could not have been more lean if she had eaten nothing whatsoever but celery and had run half a marathon every day. She had so little body fat that even in high-buoyancy saltwater, she would sink like a dropped anchor.

After ascertaining that Ryan had eaten nothing after midnight, Nurse Whipset provided a sedative and water in a small paper cup.

“This won’t put you to sleep,” she said. “It’ll just relax you.”

A second nurse, Ismay Clemm—an older, pleasantly plump black woman—had green eyes in which the striations were like the bevels in a pair of intricately cut emeralds. Those eyes would have been striking in any face; they were especially arresting because of the contrast with her smooth dark skin.

While Nurse Whipset sat at a corner desk to make an entry in Ryan’s file, Ismay watched him take the sedative. “You okay, child?”

“Not really,” he said, crushing the empty paper cup in his fist.

“This is nothin’,” she assured him as he dropped the cup in a waste can. “I’m here. I’m watchin’ over you. You’ll be just fine.”

By contrast with Nurse Whipset’s ascetic tautness, Ismay’s abundance, which included a musical voice that conveyed caring as effortlessly as it would a tune, comforted Ryan.

“Well, you are taking three pieces of my heart,” he said.

“Tiny pieces, honey. I suspect you’ve taken far bigger pieces from the tender hearts of a few sweet girls. And they’re all still livin’, aren’t they?”

In an adjacent prep room, he stripped to his undershorts, stepped into a pair of disposable slippers, and wrapped himself in a thin, pale-green, collarless robe with short sleeves.

Back in the diagnostics laboratory, Dr. Gupta had arrived, as had the radiologist.

The examination table was more comfortable than Ryan expected. Samar Gupta explained that comfort was necessary because during this procedure, a patient must lie on his back, very still, for at least an hour, in some cases perhaps for two hours or more.

Suspended over the table, a fluoroscope would instantly project moving x-ray images on a fluorescent screen.

As the cardiologist, assisted by Nurse Whipset, prepared for the procedure, Ismay Clemm monitored Ryan’s pulse. “You’re doing fine, child.”

The sedative began to take effect, and he felt calmer, although wide awake.

Kyra Whipset scrubbed Ryan’s neck and painted a portion of it with iodine.

After applying a topical anesthetic to steal the sting from the needle, Dr. Gupta administered a local anesthetic by injection to the same area.

Soon Ryan could feel nothing when the physician tested the nerve response in his neck.

He closed his eyes while something with an astringent smell was swabbed on his numb flesh.

Describing his actions aloud, Dr. Gupta made a small incision in Ryan’s jugular vein and introduced a thin, highly flexible catheter.

Ryan opened his eyes and watched the fluoroscope as it followed the tedious progress of the catheter, which the cardiologist threaded carefully into his heart, guided by the image on the screen.

He wondered what would happen if in the midst of this procedure he suffered a seizure as he had on the surfboard, his heart abruptly hammering two or three hundred beats a minute. He decided not to ask.

“How are you doing?” Dr. Gupta inquired.

“Fine. I don’t feel anything.”

“Just relax. We’re making excellent progress.”

Ryan realized that Ismay Clemm was quietly reporting on his heart rhythm, which evidently had become slightly unstable upon the introduction of the catheter.

Maybe this was normal, maybe not, but the instability passed.

And the beat goes on.

Once the primary catheter was in place, Dr. Gupta inserted into it a second catheter, a bioptome, with tiny jaws at its tip.

Ryan had lost all sense of time. He might have been on the table a few minutes or an hour.

His legs ached. In spite of the sedative, the muscles in his calves were tense. His right hand had tightened into a fist; he opened it, as if hoping to receive another’s hand, a gift.

Long he lay there, wondering, fearing.

The jaws of the bioptome bit.

Inhaling with a hiss through clenched teeth, Ryan didn’t think that he imagined the quick painful pinch, but perhaps he was reacting to the brief frantic stutter of his heart on the fluorescent screen.

Dr. Gupta retrieved the first sample of Ryan’s cardiac muscle.

Nurse Clemm said, “Don’t hold your breath, honey.”

Exhaling, Ryan realized that he expected to die during the procedure.

TEN

In just seventy minutes the biopsy had been completed and the incision repaired with stitches.

The power of the sedative was at its peak, and because Ryan had endured a sleepless night, the drug affected him more strongly than anticipated. Dr. Gupta encouraged Ryan to lie on the narrow bed in the prep room and rest awhile, until he felt fully alert and capable of driving.

The room was windowless. The overhead fluorescent panels were off, and only a fixture in a soffit above the small sink provided light.

The dark ceiling and shadow-hung walls inspired claustrophobia. Thoughts of caskets and the conqueror worm oppressed him, but the phobic moment quickly passed.

Relief that the procedure had gone well and exhaustion were tranquilizing. Ryan did not expect to sleep, but he slept.

To a discordant melody, he walked a dream road along a valley toward a palace high on a slope. Through the red-litten windows he could see vast forms that moved fantastically, and his heart began to pound, to boom, until it beat away that vision and harried in another.

A wild lake, bound all around with black rocks and tall pines, was lovely in its loneliness. Then the inky water rose in a series of small waves that lapped the shore where he stood, and he knew the lake was a pool of poison. Its gulf would be his grave.

Between these brief dreams and others, he half woke and always found Ismay Clemm at his bedside in the dimly lighted room, once taking his pulse, once with her hand to his forehead, sometimes just watching him, her dark face so shadowed that her oddly lit green eyes seemed to be disembodied.

A few times she spoke to him, and on the first occasion, she murmured, “You hear him, don’t you, child?”

Ryan had insufficient strength to ask of whom she spoke.

The nurse answered her own question: “Yes, you hear him.”

Later, between dreams, she said, “You must not listen, child.”

And later still: “If you hear the iron bells, you come to me.”

When he woke more than an hour after lying down, Ryan was alone.

The one light, the many shadows, and the sparely appointed prep room seemed less real to him than either the palace with windows full of red light or the black lake, or the other places in his dreams.

To confirm that he was awake and that the memory of the biopsy was real, he raised one hand to the small bandage on his neck, which covered the jugular wound, the stitches.

He rose, took off the robe, and dressed in his street clothes.

When Ryan entered the adjacent diagnostics lab, Ismay Clemm was nowhere to be seen. Dr. Gupta and the radiologist had gone, as well.

Nurse Whipset asked if he was all right.

He felt unreal, weightless and drifting, as if he were a ghost, an apparition that she mistook for flesh and blood.

Of course, she wasn’t asking if he felt emotionally sound, only if the sedative had worn off. He answered in the affirmative.

She informed him that the analysis of the biopsy specimens would be expedited. In the interest of greater accuracy and the collection of more precise information, however, Dr. Gupta had ordered the most detailed analysis; he didn’t expect to have the report until Tuesday.

Initially, Ryan intended to ask where he could find Ismay Clemm. He had wanted to ask her what she meant by the strange things she said to him during the brief periods when he had been half-awake.

Now, in the sterile brightness of the diagnostics lab, he was not certain that she had actually spoken to him. She might as easily have been merely a presence in his dreams.

He retrieved his Mercedes from the garage and drove home.

The clear sky presented more birds, more often, than seemed normal. Flocks were strung out in strange formations, a calligraphy of crows in which some meaning might be read if only he knew the language in which it was composed.

At a red traffic light, when he glanced at the silver Lexus in the adjacent lane, he discovered the driver staring at him: a fortysomething man, face hard and expressionless. They locked eyes, and the stranger’s intensity caused Ryan to look away first.

Two blocks later, at another red light, a young man behind the wheel of a chopped and customized Ford pickup was talking on a hands-free cell phone. Fitted to the guy’s ear, the phone stirred in Ryan a memory from an old science-fiction movie: an alien parasite, riding and controlling its human host.

The pickup driver glanced at Ryan, looked immediately away, but a moment later glanced furtively at him once more; and his lips moved faster, as if Ryan were the subject of his phone conversation.

Miles farther, when Ryan turned off Pacific Coast Highway onto Newport Coast Road, he glanced repeatedly in the rearview mirror, looking for the silver Lexus and the chopped Ford pickup.

At home, staircase to hallway to room after room, Ryan did not encounter Lee or Kay Ting, or Lee’s assistant, Donnie, or Kay’s assistant, Renata.

He heard fading footsteps on a limestone floor, a door close in another room. A distant voice and a single response were both unintelligible.

In the kitchen, he swiftly prepared an early lunch. He avoided fresh foods and containers that were already open, in favor of items in vacuum-sealed cans and jars.

A salad of button mushrooms, artichoke hearts, yellow beets, garbanzo beans, and white asparagus was enlivened with Italian dressing from a previously untapped bottle and by grated Parmesan from a new can that he opened after inspecting it for tampering.

He put the salad on a tray with a sealed package of imported panettone and utensils. After a hesitation, he added a wineglass and a half bottle of Far Niente Chardonnay.

As he carried the tray to his office in the west wing of the main floor, he saw no one, though a vacuum cleaner started in a far chamber.

None of the rooms featured security cameras, but the hallways had them. A video record of hallway traffic was stored on DVDs to be reviewed only in the event that the house was invaded by burglars or victimized by a sneak thief.

No one monitored the hallway cameras in real time. Nevertheless, Ryan felt watched.

ELEVEN

In his home office, Ryan ate at his desk, gazing out of the big windows at the swimming pool in the foreground, at the sea in the distance.

The phone rang: his most private line, a number possessed by a handful of people. The caller-ID window told him it was Samantha.

“Hey, Winky, you still aging gracefully?”

“Well, I haven’t grown any hair in my ears yet.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“And I haven’t developed man breasts.”

“You paint an irresistible portrait of yourself. Listen, I’m sorry about Wednesday night.”

“What about Wednesday night?”

“I brought the whole evening down, talking about Teresa, pulling her feeding tube, the starvation thing.”

“You never bring me down, Sam.”

“You’re sweet. But I want to make it up to you. Come over for dinner tonight. I’ll make saltimbocca alla romana.”

“I love your saltimbocca.”

“With polenta.”

“This is a lot of work.”

“Caponata to start.”

He had no reason to distrust her.

“Why don’t we eat out?” he suggested. “Then there’s no cleanup.”

“I’ll do the cleaning up.”

He loved her. She loved him. She was a good cook. He was succumbing to irrational fear.

“It’s so much work,” he said. “I heard about this great new restaurant.”

“What’s the name?”

The great new restaurant was a lie. He would have to find one. He said, “I want to surprise you.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I’m just in a going-out mood. I want to try this new place.”

They talked about what she should wear, what time he would pick her up.

“Love you,” she said.

“Love you,” he echoed, and disconnected.

He had eaten no more than a third of his lunch, but he had lost his appetite.

With a glass of Far Niente, he went outside, crossed the patio, and stood watching satiny ribbons of sunlight shimmer through the variegated-blue Italian-glass tiles that lined the swimming pool.

He became aware that he was fingering the bandage on his neck.

As Gypsies read tea leaves and palms, some shaman would read those tissue samples and tell him his fate.

The mental image of a Gypsy by candlelight led him to think of stories in which a lock of a man’s hair was used by a practitioner of black magic to cast a curse upon him.

In the hands of a voodooist, three moist pieces of a man’s heart—more intimate and therefore more powerful than a few strands of hair—might be used to destroy him in ways singularly horrific.

When a centipedal chill climbed his spine, when his heart accelerated, when a thin sweat prickled along his hairline, Ryan chastised himself for surrendering to unreason. A warrantless suspicion about Sam had metastasized into superstitious nonsense.

He went back into his office and phoned Samantha. “On second thought, I’d rather have your saltimbocca.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I don’t want to share you with a gaggle of envious men.”

“What gaggle?”

“The waiter, the busboy, and every man in the restaurant who would be lucky enough to lay eyes on you.”

“Sometimes, Winky, you walk a thin line between being a true romantic and a bullshit artist.”

“I’m only speaking from the heart.”

“Well, sweetie, if you’re going to do more of that this evening, bring a shovel. I don’t have one.”

She hung up, and before Ryan could lower the handset from his ear, he heard what might have been a brief, stifled laugh.

Although Sam had disconnected, the dial tone did not return. Ryan listened to the faint hollow hiss of an open line.

“Who’s there?” he asked.

No one answered.

The house phone was a digital hybrid system with ten lines, plus intercom and doorbell functions. None of the phone lines was shared, and no other phones in the house could eavesdrop on a line that was in use.

He waited for another telltale sound, like guarded breathing or a background noise in the room where the listener sat, but he was not rewarded. He had nothing more than an impression of someone out there in the ether, a hostile presence that might or might not be real.

At last he returned the handset to the cradle.

By four o’clock Friday afternoon, sooner than promised, Wilson Mott provided by e-mail a background report on Samantha’s mother.

As soon as Ryan had a printout, he sent the e-mail to trash, and at once deleted it from trash to ensure no one could retrieve it. He sat on a lounge chair by the pool to read Mott’s findings.

Rebecca Lorraine Reach, fifty-six, lived in a Las Vegas apartment complex called the Oasis. She was employed as a blackjack dealer at one of the classier casinos.

By means most likely questionable, Mott had obtained the current photo of Rebecca on file with the Nevada Gaming Control Board. She looked no older than forty—and remarkably like her daughter.

She owned a white Ford Explorer. Her driving record was clean.

She had never been a party to a criminal or civil action in Nevada. Her credit report indicated a responsible borrowing history.

According to a neighbor, Amy Crocker, Rebecca rarely socialized with other tenants at the Oasis, had a “my-poop-don’t-smell attitude,” never spoke of having a daughter, either dead or alive, and was in a romantic relationship with a man named Spencer Barghest.

Mott reported that Barghest had been indicted twice for murder, in Texas, and twice had been judged innocent. As a noted right-to-die activist, he had been present at scores of assisted suicides. There was reason to believe that some of those whom he had assisted were not terminally—or even chronically—ill, and that the signatures on their requests for surcease from suffering were forged.

Ryan had no idea how an assisted suicide was effectuated. Maybe Barghest supplied an overdose of sedatives, which would be a painless poison but a kind of poison nonetheless.

Mott’s report included a photo of Spencer Barghest. He had an ideal face for a stand-up comic: agreeable but rubbery features, a knowing yet ingratiating grin, and a shock of white hair cut in a punkish bristle that looked amusing on a fiftysomething guy.

Because he might be critically ill, Ryan was troubled to find only three degrees of separation between himself and a man who would be pleased to grant him eternal peace whether he wanted it or not.

This, however, did not confirm his intuitive sense that Sam’s mother—and perhaps Samantha herself—was linked to his sudden health problems.

Life was often marked by synchronicities, surprising connections that seemed to be meaningful. But coincidence was only coincidence.

Barghest might be a nasty piece of work, but there was nothing sinister in his relationship with Rebecca, nothing relating to Ryan.

In his current state of mind, he had to guard against a tendency toward paranoia. Such a regrettable inclination had already led him to order Mott’s report on Samantha’s mother.

Rebecca had turned out to be an ordinary person leading an unremarkable existence. Ryan’s suspicion had been irrational.

Now that he thought about it, the presence of Spencer Barghest in Rebecca Reach’s life was not surprising. It didn’t even qualify as a coincidence, let alone a suspicious one.

Six years ago, she had made the difficult decision to remove a feeding tube from her brain-damaged daughter. A weight of guilt might have settled on her—especially when Samantha strenuously disagreed with her decision.

To assuage the guilt, Rebecca might have pored through right-to-die literature, seeking philosophical justification for what she had done. She might even have joined an activist organization, and at one of its meetings might have encountered Spencer Barghest.

Because Samantha had been estranged from her mother since Teresa’s death, she probably didn’t even know that Barghest and Rebecca were an item.

Ashamed that he had entertained any doubts about Sam, Ryan got up from the poolside lounge chair and returned to his study.

He sat at his desk and switched on the paper shredder. For a long moment, he listened to its motor purring, its blades scissoring.

Finally he switched off the shredder. He put the report in a wall safe behind a sliding panel in the back of a built-in cabinet.

Fear had gotten its teeth so firmly into him that he could not easily pry it loose.

TWELVE

Over the years, the immense pepper tree had conformed around the second-story deck. Consequently, the feeling of being in a tree house was even greater here than when you looked out of the apartment windows.

Samantha had draped a red-checkered cloth over the patio table and had set out white dishes, flatware, and a red bowl of white roses.

Filtered through the tree, late golden sunlight showered her with a wealth of bright coins as she poured for Ryan a Cabernet Sauvignon that was beyond her budget, while he lied to her about the reason for the bandage on his neck.

Following a crimson sunset and purple twilight, she lit red candles in clear cups and served dinner as the stars came out, with a Connie Dover CD of Celtic music turned low.

Having allowed fear to raise doubts about Sam, having ordered a background report on her mother, Ryan initially expected to feel awkward in her company. In a sense, he had betrayed her trust.

He was at once, however, at ease with her. Her singular beauty did more to improve his mood than did the wine, and a dinner superbly prepared was less nourishing than the faultless golden smoothness of her skin.

After dinner, after they stacked the dishes in the sink, and over the last of the wine, she said, “Let’s go to bed, Winky.”

Suddenly Ryan was concerned that impotence might prove to be a symptom of his illness. He need not have worried.

In bed, in motion, he wondered briefly if lovemaking would stress his heart and trigger a seizure. He survived.

Cuddling afterward, his arm around Samantha and her head upon his chest, he said, “I’m such an idiot.”

She sighed. “Surely you didn’t just arrive at this realization.”

“No. The thought has occurred to me before.”

“So what happened recently to remind you?”

If he confessed his absurd suspicions, he would be forced to disclose his health concerns. He did not want to worry her until he had Dr. Gupta’s report and knew the full extent of his problem.

Instead, he said, “I threw out those sandals.”

“The pair recycled from old tires?”

“I was suckered by the planet-friendly name of the company— Green Footwear.”

“You’re gorgeous, Dotcom, but you’re still a geek.”

For a long while, they talked about nothing important, which sometimes can be the best kind of conversation.

Samantha drifted into sleep, a golden vision in the lamplight, and Ryan soon traded the soothing sight of her for dreams.

Dream changed fluidly into dream, until he was in a city in the sea, at the bottom of an abyss. Shrines and palaces and towers were lit by eerie light streaming up domes, up spires, up kingly halls, up fanes, up Babylon-like walls. He drifted through flooded streets, drowned in deep-sea silence … until he heard a bass throbbing full of melancholy menace. Although he knew the source of the sound, he dared not name it, for to name it would be to embrace it.

He woke in low light. The dread that weighed him down was not of an imminent threat but of some monumental peril he sensed coming in the weeks and months ahead, not the failure of his body but some worse and nameless jeopardy. His heart did not race, but each beat was like a heavy piston stroke in some great slow machine.

Although Samantha’s alluring scent clung to the sheets, she had risen from the bed while Ryan slept. He was alone in the room.

The digital clock on the nightstand read 11:24 p.m. He had been asleep less than an hour.

The light that came through the half-open door called to mind the strange glow in the submerged city of his dream.

He pulled on his khakis and, barefoot, went in search of Sam.

In the combination dining room and living room, beside an armchair, a bronze floorlamp with a beaded-glass shade provided a brandy-colored light, dappling the floor with bead gleam and bead shadow.

The kitchen was an extension of the main room, and there the door stood open to the deck on which they had sat for dinner.

The candles were extinguished. Only faint moonlight glazed the air, and the branches of the old tree were tentacular in the gloom.

The mild air was slightly scented by the nearby sea, more generously by night-blooming jasmine.

Samantha was not on the deck. Stairs descended to the courtyard between the garage and the house.

Murmuring voices rose from below, leading Ryan away from the stairs to a railing. Looking down, he saw Samantha because a shaft of moonlight devalued her hair from gold to silver and caressed her pearl-white silk robe.

The second person stood in shadows, but from the timbre of the voice, Ryan knew this was a man.

He could not hear their words, and he could not discern their mood from the rhythms of their conversation.

As in the butler’s pantry the previous night, when he tried unsuccessfully to eavesdrop on a whispered discussion in the kitchen, he was overcome by a creeping unease, by a tantalizing suggestion of hidden dimensions and secret meanings in things that had heretofore seemed simple, clear, and fully understood.

From a tonal change in the voices, Ryan inferred that the pair below had reached the end of their discussion. Indeed, the man turned away from Samantha.

As the stranger moved, shadows at first clung to him, but then relented. The lunar glow was illuminating yet at the same time misty and mystifying, veiling as much as it revealed.

Tall, slim, moving with athletic confidence, the man crossed the moonshadow-mottled lawn toward the alleyway behind the garage, his hair white and punk-cut, as though he wore a jagged crown of ice.

Spencer Barghest, reputed lover of Rebecca Reach, compassionate and eager guide to the suicidal, was visible for only a brief moment. Moonlight shrank from him, and shadows took him in; the intervening limbs and leaves of the California pepper blocked him from further view.

Below, Samantha turned toward the steps.

THIRTEEN

Ryan backed barefoot off the deck and through the open door. He turned and hurried out of the kitchen, across the front room.

In the bedroom, he stripped off his khakis. He draped them over the arm of a chair, as they had been, and returned to bed.

Under the covers, he realized that he had not thought through this retreat, but had instinctively chosen to avoid confrontation. In retrospect, he was not sure that he had taken the wisest course.

Feigning sleep, he heard Samantha enter the bedroom, and heard the silken rustle of her robe discarded.

Under the covers once more, she said softly, “Ryan?” When he did not reply, she repeated his name.

If she believed that he was faking sleep, she might suspect that he had seen or heard something of the assignation under the pepper tree. Therefore, he said sleepily, “Hmmmm?”

She slid against him and took hold of what she wanted.

Under the circumstances, he did not believe that he could rise to the occasion. He was surprised—and dismayed—to discover desire trumped his concern that she was guilty of dissimulation if not duplicity.

The qualities he found most erotic in a woman were intelligence, wit, affection, and tenderness. Sam had all four and could not fake the first two, though Ryan now worried that her intelligence was of a kind that facilitated manipulation and fostered cunning. He wondered if in fact she loved him and wanted the best for him, or had all along been disingenuous.

Never before had he made love when his heart was a cauldron of such wretched feelings, when physical passion was detached from all of the gentler emotions. In fact, love might have had nothing to do with it.

When the moment had passed, Samantha kissed his brow, his chin, his throat. She whispered, “Good night, Winky,” and turned away from him, onto her side.

Soon her open-mouthed breathing indicated that she slept. Or pretended to sleep.

Ryan pressed two fingers to his throat to time his pulse. He marveled at the slow steady throb, which seemed to be yet another deception, the most intimate one so far: his body pretending to be in good health when actually it was in the process of failing him.

For an hour, he stared at the ceiling but in fact examined, with memory’s eye, a year of loving Samantha. He sought to recall any incident that, from his new perspective, suggested she had darker intentions than those he had attributed to her at the time.

Initially, none of her actions through the months seemed in the least deceitful. When Ryan considered those same moments a second time, however, shadows fell where shadows had not been before, and every memory was infused with an impression of hidden motives and of secret conspirators lurking just offstage.

No specific deceit occurred to him, no example of her possible duplicity prior to the last few days, yet a cold current of suspicion crawled along his nerves.

The tendency to paranoia that infected contemporary culture had always disquieted him. He was ashamed to be indulging in the self-delusion that troubled him in others. He had a few disturbing facts; but he was trying to manufacture others out of fevered fantasies.

Ryan rose quietly from bed, and Samantha did not stir.

A window invited moonlight, which fell so lightly in this space that he could not have perceived the positions of the furniture if he had not been familiar with the room.

More than half blind, but with a blind man’s intuition, he found his clothes, dressed, and silently navigated the bedroom. Without a sound, he closed the door behind him.

Familiarity with the floor plan and dark-adapted eyes allowed him to reach the kitchen without a misstep or collision. He switched on the light above the sink.

On the notepad by the telephone, he left her a message: Sam, manic insomnia strikes again. Too jittery to lie still. Call you tomorrow. Love, Winky.

He drove home, where he packed a suitcase.

The great house was as silent as the vacuum between planets. Although he made only a few small noises, each seemed as loud as thunder.

He drove to a hotel, where no one on his house staff or in his private life would think to look for him.

In an anonymous room, on a too-soft bed, he slept so soundly for six hours that he did not dream. When he woke Saturday morning, he was in the fetal position in which he had gone to sleep.

His hands ached. Evidently, he had closed them into fists through most of the night.

Before ordering a room-service breakfast, Ryan made two phone calls. The first was to Wilson Mott, the detective. The second was to arrange to have one of Be2Do’s corporate jets fly him to Las Vegas.

FOURTEEN

Flensing knives of desert sun stripped the air to the bone, and the shimmers of heat rising off the airport Tarmac were as dry as the breath of a dead sea.

The Learjet and crew would stand by to return Ryan to southern California the following morning.

A black Mercedes sedan and chauffeur awaited him at the private-plane terminal. The driver introduced himself as George Zane, an employee of Wilson Mott’s security firm.

He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. Instead of shoes, he wore boots, and the blunt toes looked as though they might be reinforced with steel caps.

Two knots of pale scar tissue marked his shaved head at the brink of his brow. Tall, muscular, with a thick neck, with wide nostrils and intense eyes as purple-black as plum skins, Zane looked as though his lineage included bull blood, suggesting that the scars on his skull resulted from the surgical removal of horns.

He was not only a driver but also a bodyguard, and more. After Zane stowed Ryan’s suitcase in the trunk, he opened a rear door of the sedan for him and presented him with a disposable cell phone.

“While you’re here,” Zane said, “make any calls with this. They can never be traced to you.”

Like a limousine, this customized sedan was equipped with a motorized privacy panel between the front seat and the back.

Through the tinted windows, Ryan gazed at the barren desert mountains in the distance until a maze of soaring hotels and casinos blocked the natural world from view.

At the hotel where Ryan would stay, Zane parked in a VIP zone. While Ryan waited in the car, the driver carried the suitcase inside.

When Zane returned, he opened a back door to give an electronic- key card to Ryan. “Room eleven hundred. It’s a suite. It’s registered to me. Your name appears nowhere, sir.”

As they pulled away from the hotel, the disposable cell phone rang, and Ryan answered it.

A woman said, “Are you ready to see Rebecca’s apartment?”

Rebecca Reach. Samantha’s mother.

“Yes,” said Ryan.

“It’s number thirty-four, on the second floor. I’m already inside.”

She terminated the call.

Away from the fabled Strip, Vegas was a parched suburban sprawl. Pale stucco houses reflected the bloodless Mojave sun, and many landscape schemes employed pebbles, rocks, cactuses, and succulents.

The palm fronds looked brittle. The olive trees appeared more gray than green.

Ribbons of heat, rising from vast parking lots, caused shopping malls to shimmer and shift shape like the underwater city in his troubling dream.

Sand, dry weeds, and litter choked tracts of undeveloped land.

The Oasis, an upscale two-story apartment complex, was a cream-colored structure with a roof of turquoise tiles. The privacy wall that concealed its large courtyard was inlaid with a caravan of ceramic Art Deco camels that matched the color of the roof.

Behind the apartments stood garages, as well as guest parking shaded by horizontal trellises festooned with purple bougainvillea.

Zane put down the privacy panel and both front windows before switching off the engine. “You best walk in alone. Be casual.”

After stepping out of the car, Ryan considered returning at once to it and calling off this questionable operation.

The memory of Spencer Barghest standing under the pepper tree with Samantha, his thatch of hair whiter than white in the moonlight, reminded Ryan of what he needed to know and why he needed to know it.

Beyond the back gate lay a covered walkway to the courtyard, but the gate could be opened only with a tenant’s key. He had to walk around to the public entrance.

The wrought-iron front gate featured a palm-tree motif and had been finished to resemble the green patina of weathered copper.

At the center of the courtyard lay a large pool and spa with turquoise-tile coping. Faint fumes of chlorine trembled in the scorched air and seemed to vibrate in Ryan’s nostrils.

Sun-browned and oiled, a few residents lay on lounge chairs, courting melanoma. None looked toward him.

The deep deck that served the second-floor apartments formed the roof of a continuous veranda benefiting the first-floor units. Lush landscaping included queen palms of various heights, which did much to screen the three wings of the building from one another.

He climbed exterior stairs and found Apartment 34. The door stood ajar, and it opened wider as he approached.

Waiting for him in the foyer was an attractive brunette with a honeymoon mouth and funereal eyes the gray of gravestone granite.

She worked for Wilson Mott. Although entirely feminine, she gave the impression that she could protect whatever virtue she might still possess, and could leave any would-be assailant with impressions of her shoe heels in his face.

Closing the door behind Ryan, she said, “Rebecca is a day-shift dealer. She’s at the casino for hours yet.”

“Have you found anything unusual?”

“I haven’t looked, sir. I don’t know what you’re after. I’m just here to guard the door and get you out quickly in a pinch.”

“What’s your name?”

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be the truth.”

“Why not?”

“What we’re doing here’s illegal. I prefer anonymity.”

From her manner, he inferred that she did not approve of this mission or of him. Of course, his life, not hers, was in jeopardy.

In Rebecca Reach’s absence, the air conditioner was set at seventy degrees, which suggested she did not live on a tight budget.

Ryan started his search in the kitchen, half expecting to find an array of poisons in the pantry.

FIFTEEN

Initially, roaming Rebecca Reach’s apartment, Ryan felt like a burglar, although he had no intention of stealing anything. A flush burned in his face and guilt increased the tempo of his heart.

By the time he finished with the kitchen, the dining area, and the living room, he decided he couldn’t afford shame or any strong emotion that might precipitate a seizure. He proceeded with clinical detachment.

From the decor, he deduced that Rebecca cared little for the pleasures of hearth and home. The minimal furnishings were in drab shades of beige and gray. Only one piece of art—an abstract nothing—hung in the living room, none in the dining area.

The lack of a single keepsake or souvenir implied that she was not a sentimental woman.

By the lack of dust, by the alphabetical arrangement of spices in the kitchen, by the precise placement of six accent pillows on the sofa, Ryan determined that Rebecca valued neatness and order. The evidence suggested she was a solemn person with an austere heart.

As Ryan stepped into the study, the disposable cell phone rang. No caller ID appeared on the screen.

When he said hello, no one replied, but after he said hello a second time, a woman began softly to hum a tune. He did not recognize the song, but her crooning was sweet, melodic.

“Who is this?” he asked.

The soft voice became softer, faded, faint but still felicitous, and faded further until it receded into silence.

With his free hand, he fingered the bandage on his neck, where a day previous the catheter had been inserted into his jugular.

Although the singer had not sung a word, perhaps subconsciously Ryan recognized the voice—or imagined that he did— because into his mind unbidden came the emerald-green eyes and the smooth dark face of Ismay Clemm, the nurse from the cardiac-diagnostics lab at the hospital.

After he had waited nearly a minute for the singer to find her voice again, he pressed end and returned the phone to a pants pocket.

In memory, he heard what Ismay had said to him as he had dozed on and off, recovering from the sedative: You hear him, don’t you, child? Yes, you hear him. You must not listen, child.

A deep misgiving overcame Ryan, and for a moment he almost fled the apartment. He did not belong there.

Inhaling deeply, exhaling slowly, he strove to steady his nerves.

He had come to Las Vegas to seek the truth of the threat against him, to determine if he had only nature to fear or, instead, a web of conspirators. His survival might depend on completing his inquiries.

Rebecca’s study proved to be as blandly furnished and impersonal as the other rooms. The top of her desk was bare.

About a hundred hardcover books filled a set of shelves. They were all nonfiction, concerned with self-improvement and investing.

Closer consideration revealed that none of the books offered a serious program for either self-assessment or wise money management. They were about the mystical power of positive thinking, about wishing your way to success, about one arcane secret or another that guaranteed to revolutionize your finances and your life.

In essence, they were get-rich-quick books. They promised great prosperity with little work.

That Rebecca collected so many volumes of this nature suggested that she had drifted through the years on dreams of wealth. By now, at the age of fifty-six, disappointment and frustration might have left her bitter—and impatient.

None of these volumes would suggest that you marry your daughter off to a wealthy man and poison him to gain control of his fortune. Any illiterate person could conceive such a plan, without need for the inspiration of a book.

At once, Ryan regretted leaping to such an unkind conclusion. By suspecting Rebecca of such villainy, he was being unfair to Samantha.

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