When Joe tried to use the distinctive hat as a prod to memory, he came up blank, but when he pictured the man without the hat and focused on the flowing white hair, he thought of the blue-robed cult members with the shaven heads. The connection eluded him, seemed absurd.
Then he thought of the bonfire around which the cultists had been standing last night on the beach, where he had disposed of the McDonald’s bag that contained the Kleenex damp with Charlie Delmann’s blood. And the lithe dancers in bathing suits around another bonfire. A third fire and the gathering of surfers inside the totemic ring of their upended boards. And still another fire around which sat a dozen enthralled listeners as a stocky man with a broad charismatic face and a mane of white hair narrated a ghost story in a reverberant voice.
This man. The storyteller.
Joe had no doubt that they were one and the same.
He also knew there was no likelihood whatsoever that he had crossed this man’s path on the beach last night and again here sheerly by chance. All is intimately interwoven in this most conspiratorial of all worlds.
They must have been conducting surveillance on him for weeks or months, waiting for Rose to contact him, when he had finally become aware of them on Santa Monica Beach, Saturday morning.
During that time they had learned all his haunts, which were not numerous: the apartment, a couple of coffee shops, the cemetery, and a few favourite beaches where he went to learn indifference from the sea.
After he had disabled Wallace Blick, invaded their van, and then fled the cemetery, they had lost him. He had found the transponder on his car and thrown it into the passing gardener’s truck, and they had lost him. They’d almost caught up with him again at the Post, but he’d slipped away minutes ahead of them.
So they had staked out his apartment, the coffee shops, the beaches—waiting for him to show up somewhere. The group being entertained by the ghost story had been ordinary civilians, but the storyteller who had insinuated himself into their gathering was not in the least ordinary.
They had picked Joe up once more the past night on the beach. He knew the correct surveillance jargon: They had reacquired him on the beach. Followed him to the convenience store from which he had telephoned Mario Oliveri in Denver and Barbara in Colorado Springs. Followed him to his motel.
They could have killed him there. Quietly. While he slept or after waking him with a gun to his head. They could have made it look like a drug overdose—or like suicide.
In the heat of the moment, they had been eager to shoot him down at the cemetery, but they were no longer in a hurry to see him dead. Because maybe, just maybe, he would lead them again to Rose Marie Tucker.
Evidently they weren’t aware that he had been at the Delmann house, among other places, during the hours they had lost contact with him. If they knew he’d seen what had happened to the Delmanns and to Lisa—even though he could not understand it—they probably would terminate him. Take no chances. Terminate him “with extreme prejudice,” as their kind phrased it.
During the night, they had placed another tracking device on his car. In the hour before dawn, they followed him to LAX, always at a distance where they were in no danger of being spotted. Then to Denver and perhaps beyond.
Jesus.
What had frightened the deer in the woods?
Joe felt stupid and careless, although he knew that he was not either. He couldn’t expect to be as good at this game as they were; he’d never played it before, but they played it every day.
He was getting better, though. He was getting better.
Farther up the aisle, the storyteller reached the exit door and disappeared into the debarkation umbilical.
Joe was afraid of losing his stalker, but it was imperative that they continue to believe that he was unaware of them.
Barbara Christman was in terrible danger. First thing, he had to find a phone and warn her.