Instead of repeating What are you doing, buddy, as Dylan expected, the kid said, 'I see a big house overlooking the lake.'

'Huh? You see a house? You see it, too?'

'Cake?'

'Peanuts, Shep, peanuts.'

'Cake?'

'You've got your hand on it, you're looking right at it, Shep. You can see it's a bag of peanuts.'

'Tahoe cake?'

'Oh. Yeah, maybe. They probably have cake at this place in Tahoe. Lots of cake. All kinds of cake. Chocolate cake, lemon cake, spice cake, carrot cake—'

'Shep doesn't like carrot cake.'

'No, I didn't mean that, I was wrong about that, they don't have any carrot cake, Shep, just every other kind of friggin' cake in the world.'

'Cake,' said Shepherd, and the New Mexico desert folded away as a cool green place folded toward them.

46

Great pines, both conical and spreading varieties, many standing over two hundred feet tall, built sublimely scented palaces on the slopes around the lake, green rooms of perpetual Christmas ornamented with cones as small as apricots and others as large as pineapples.

The famous lake, seen through felicitous frames of time-worked branches, fulfilled its reputation as the most colorful body of water in the world. From a central depth greater than fifteen hundred feet to shoreline shallows, it shimmered iridescently in countless shades of green, blue, and purple.

Folding from the magnificent barrenness of the desert to the glory of Tahoe, Jilly exhaled the possibility of scorpions and cactus moths, inhaled air stirred by butterflies and by brown darting birds.

Shepherd had conveyed them to a flagstone footpath that wound through the forest, through a softness of feathery pine shadows and woodland ferns. At the end of the path stood the house: Wrightian, stone and silvered cedar, enormous yet in exquisite harmony with its natural setting, featuring deeply cantilevered roofs and many tall windows.

'I know this house,' Jilly said.

'You've been here?'

'No. Never. But I've seen pictures of it somewhere. Probably in a magazine.'

'It's definitely an Architectural Digest sort of place.'

Broad flagstone steps led up to an entry terrace overhung by a cedar-soffited, cantilevered roof.

Ascending to the terrace between Dylan and Shepherd, Jilly said, 'This place is connected to Lincoln Proctor?'

'Yeah. I don't know how, but from the spoor, I know he was here at least once, maybe more than once, and it was an important place to him.'

'Could it be his house?'

Dylan shook his head. 'I don't think so.'

The front door and flanking sidelights doubled as sculpture: an Art Deco geometric masterpiece half bronze and half stained glass.

'What if it's a trap?' she worried.

'No one knows we're coming. It can't be a trap. Besides... it doesn't feel that way.'

'Maybe we should run a little surveillance on the joint for a while, watch it from the trees, till we see who comes and goes.'

'My instinct says go for it. Hell, I don't have a choice. The compulsion to keep moving is like... a thousand hands shoving on my back. I've got to ring that doorbell.'

He rang it.

Although Jilly considered sprinting away through the trees, she remained at Dylan's side. She in her changefulness no longer had any refuge in the ordinary world where she could claim to belong, and her only place, if she indeed had one at all, must be with the O'Conner brothers, as their only place must be now with her.

The man who opened the door was tall, handsome, with prematurely snow-white hair and extraordinary gray eyes the shade of tarnished silver. Those piercing eyes surely had the capacity to appear steely and intimidating, but at the moment, they were as warm and as without threat as the gray skeins of a gentle spring rain.

His voice, which Jilly had always assumed must be electronically enhanced during his broadcasts, possessed precisely the reverberant timbre and the smoky quality familiar from radio, and was instantly recognizable. Parish Lantern said, 'Jillian, Dylan, Shepherd, I've been expecting you. Please come in. My house is your house.'

Apparently as stunned as Jilly, Dylan said, 'You? I mean... really? You?'

'I am certainly me, yes, at least the last time I looked in the mirror. Come in, come in. We've much to talk about, much to do.'

The spacious reception hall had a limestone floor, honey-tone wood paneling, a pair of rosewood Chinese chairs with emerald-green cushions, and a central table holding a large red-bronze jardiniere filled with dozens of fresh yellow, red, and orange tulips.

Jilly felt surprisingly welcome, almost as if she had found her way as sometimes a dog, lost during its family's move from one city to another, can travel by instinct across great distances to a new home it has never seen.

Closing the front door, Parish Lantern said, 'Later, you can freshen up, change clothes. When I knew you'd be coming and in what condition, without luggage, I took the liberty of having my houseboy, Ling, purchase fresh clothes for all of you, of the style I believe you prefer. Finding Wile E. Coyote T-shirts on such short notice proved to be something of a challenge. Ling had to catch a flight to Los Angeles on Wednesday, where he obtained a dozen in Shepherd's size at the souvenir shop on the Warner Brothers Studio lot.'

'Wednesday?' Dylan asked, with a trowel's worth of bewilderment plastered on his face.

'I didn't even meet Dylan and Shepherd until last night,' Jilly said. 'Friday night. Less than eighteen hours ago.'

Smiling, nodding, Lantern said, 'And it's been quite a thrilling eighteen hours, hasn't it? I'll want to hear all about it. But first things first.'

'Cake,' said Shep.

'Yes,' Lantern assured him, 'I've got cake for you, Shepherd. But first things first.'

'Cake.'

'You're a determined young man, aren't you?' Lantern said. 'Good. I approve of determination.'

'Cake.'

'Good heavens, lad, one might suspect that you're possessed by a cake-loving brain leech from an alternate reality. If there were such things as brain leeches from an alternate reality, of course.'

'I never believed there were,' Jilly assured him.

'Millions do, my dear,' said Lantern.

'Cake.'

'We'll get you a big square of cake,' Lantern promised Shep, 'in just a little while. But first things first. Please come with me.'

As the three of them followed the talk-show host out of the reception hall and through a library that contained more books than did the libraries of most small cities, Dylan said to Jilly, 'Did you know about all this?'

Amazed by the question, she said, 'How would I know about this?'

'Well, you're the Parish Lantern fan. Big Foot, extraterrestrial conspiracy theories, all that stuff.'

'I doubt that Big Foot has anything to do with this. And I'm not an extraterrestrial conspirator.'

'That's exactly what an extraterrestrial conspirator would say.'

'For God's sake, I'm not an extraterrestrial conspirator. I'm a standup comedian.'

'Extraterrestrial conspirators and standup comedians aren't mutually exclusive,' he said.

'Cake,' Shep insisted.

At the end of the library, Lantern halted, turned to them, and said, 'You've no reason to be afraid here.'

'No, no,' Dylan explained, 'we were just goofing, a private joke sort of thing that goes back a long way with us.'

'Almost eighteen hours,' Jilly said.

'Just remember at all times,' Lantern said cryptically yet with the warmth of a loving uncle, 'regardless of what happens, you've no reason to be afraid here.'

'Cake.'

'In due time, lad.'

Lantern led them out of the library into an enormous living room furnished with contemporary sofas and armchairs upholstered in pale-gold silks, enlivened by an eclectic but pleasing mix of Art Deco decorative objects and Chinese antiquities.

Formed almost entirely of six enormous windows, the south wall provided a magnificent panoramic view of the colorful lake between the graceful framing branches of two giant sugar pines.

The vista was so spectacular that Jilly spontaneously exclaimed – 'Gorgeous!' – before she realized that Lincoln Proctor stood in the room, awaiting them, holding a pistol in his right hand.

47

This Lincoln Proctor wasn't a charred slab of meat and shattered bones, although Dylan hoped to reduce him to that or worse if given a chance. Not one singed patch of hair, not the smallest smudge of ash remained to suggest that he had burned to death in Jilly's Coupe DeVille. Even his dreamy smile remained intact.

'Sit down,' Proctor said, 'and let's talk about this.'

Jilly responded with a rudeness, and Dylan topped her suggestion with one even ruder.

'Yes, you've good reason to hate me,' Proctor said remorsefully. 'I've done terrible things to you, unpardonable things. I'm not going to make any attempt to justify myself. But we are in this together.'

'We're not in anything with you,' Dylan said fiercely. 'We're not your friends or associates, or even just your guinea pigs. We're your victims, your enemies, and we'll gut you if we get a chance.'

'Would anyone like a drink?' asked Parish Lantern.

'I owe you an explanation at least, at the very least,' Proctor said. 'And I'm sure once you hear me out, you'll see that we have a mutual interest that does make us allies, even if uneasy allies.'

'Cocktail, brandy, beer, wine, soft drink?' Lantern offered.

'Who burned up in my car?' Jilly demanded.

'An unlucky motel guest who crossed my path,' said Proctor. 'He was about my size. After I killed him, I put my ID on him, my watch, other items. Since going on the run a week ago, I'd carried with me a briefcase bomb – small explosive charge, but mostly jellied gasoline – for just that purpose. I detonated it with a remote control.'

'If no one cares for a drink,' said Lantern, 'I'll just sit down and finish mine.'

He went to an armchair from which he could watch them, and he picked up a glass of white wine from a small table beside the chair.

The rest of them remained on their feet.

To Proctor, Jilly said, 'An autopsy would prove the poor son of a bitch wasn't you.'

He shrugged. 'Of course. But when the gentlemen in the black Suburbans were closing in on me, the big boom distracted them, didn't it? The diversion bought me a few hours, a chance to slip away. Oh, despicable, I know, to sacrifice an innocent man's life to gain a few hours or days for myself, but I've done worse in my life. I've—'

Interrupting Proctor's wearisome self-accusatory patter, Jilly said, 'Who are those guys in the Suburbans?'

'Mercenaries. Some former Russian Spetznaz, some American Delta Force members gone bad, all former special-forces soldiers from one country or another. They hire out to the highest bidder.'

'Who're they working for now?'

'My business partners,' Proctor said.

From his armchair, Parish Lantern said, 'When a man is so badly wanted that an entire army has been put together to kill him, that's quite an achievement.'

'My partners are extremely wealthy individuals, billionaires, who control several major banks and corporations. When I started to have some success with experimental subjects, my partners suddenly realized that their personal fortunes and those of their companies might be at risk from endless liability suits, billions in potential settlements when... things went wrong. Settlements that would have dwarfed the billions squeezed from the tobacco industry. They wanted to shut everything down, destroy my research.'

'What things went wrong?' Dylan asked tightly.

'Don't go through the whole dreary list like you did with me. Just tell them about Manuel,' Lantern suggested.

'A fat angry sociopath,' said Proctor. 'I should never have accepted him as a subject. Within hours of injection, he developed the ability to start fires with the power of his mind. Unfortunately, he enjoyed burning things too much. Things and people. He did a lot of damage before he could be put down.'

Dylan felt queasy, almost moved to a chair, but then remembered his mother and stayed on his feet.

'Where in the name of God do you get subjects for experiments like this?' Jilly wondered.

The dreamy smile kinked up at one corner. 'Volunteers.'

'What kind of morons would volunteer to have their brains pumped full of nanomachines?'

'I see you've done some research. What you couldn't have learned is that we progressed secretly to human experimentation at a facility in Mexico. Officials are still easily bribed there.'

'More cheaply than our best senators,' Lantern added dryly.

Proctor sat on the edge of a chair, but he kept the pistol aimed at them. He looked exhausted. He must have come directly here from Arizona the previous night, with little or no rest. His usually pink face was gray and drawn. 'The volunteers were felons, lifers. The worst of the worst. If you were condemned to spend the rest of your days in a stinking Mexican prison, but you could earn money for luxuries and maybe even time off your sentence, you'd volunteer for just about anything. They were hardened criminals, but this was an inhumane thing I did to them—'

'A wicked, wicked thing,' Lantern said, as though admonishing a naughty child.

'Yes, it was. I admit it. A wicked thing. I was—'

'So,' said Dylan impatiently, 'when some of these prisoners dropped sixty IQ points, like you said, your partners started having nightmares about hordes of attorneys thick as cockroaches.'

'No. Those who collapsed intellectually or self-destructed in some other manner – they weren't of concern to us. Prison officials just filled in false information on their death certificates, and no one could link them to us.'

'Another wicked, wicked thing,' said Lantern, and clucked his tongue in disapproval. 'The wicked, wicked things just never stop.'

'But if someone like Manuel, our firestarter, ever got loose and burned his way through customs at the border, got into San Diego and went nuts there, destroying whole blocks of the city, hundreds if not thousands of people... then maybe we couldn't distance ourselves from him. Maybe he'd talk about us to someone. Then... liability suits from here to the end of the century.'

'This is an excellent Chardonnay,' Lantern declared, 'if anyone would like to reconsider. No? You're just leaving more for me. And now we come to the sad part of the tale. The sad and frustrating part. An almost tragic revelation. Tell them the sad part, Lincoln.'