The man with the Desert Eagle said, ‘You know how powerful this weapon is? You know what it’ll do to your head?’

Still softly radiant but now also as powerless as a ghost, the astonished storyteller said, ‘Shit.’

‘Pulverize your skull, take your fat head right off your neck, is what it’ll do,’ said the new arrival. ‘It’s a doorbuster. Now toss your gun in the sand in front of Joe.’

The storyteller hesitated.

‘Now.’

Managing to surrender with arrogance, the storyteller threw the gun as if disdaining it, and the weapon thudded into the sand at Joe’s feet.

The saviour with the .44 said, ‘Pick it up, Joe.’

As Joe retrieved the pistol, he saw the new arrival use the Desert Eagle as a club. The storyteller dropped to his knees, then to his hands and knees, but did not go all the way out until struck with the

pistol a second time, whereupon he ploughed the sand with his face, planting his nose like a tuber. The stranger with the .44 — a black man dressed entirely in black — stooped to turn the white-maned head gently to one side to ensure that the unconscious thug would not suffocate.

The agent with the knee-smashed face stopped cursing. Now that no witnesses of his own kind were able to hear, he sobbed miserably again.

The black man said, ‘Come on, Joe.’

More impressed than ever with Mahalia and her odd collection of amateurs, Joe said, ‘Where’s Rose?’

‘This way, we’ve got her.’

With the disabled agent’s sobs purling eerily across the strand behind them, Joe hurried with the black man north, in the direction that he and Rose had been heading when they were assaulted.

He almost stumbled over another unconscious man lying in the sand. This was evidently the first one who had rushed them, the one who had fired a gun.

Rose was on the beach but in the inky shadow of the bluff. Joe could barely see her in the murk, but she seemed to be hugging herself as though she were shivering and cold on this mild summer night.

He was half surprised by the wave of relief that washed through him at the sight of her, not because she was his only link to Nina but because he was genuinely glad that she was alive and safe. For all that she had frustrated and angered and sorely confused him, she was still special, for he recalled, as well, the kindness in her eyes when she had encountered him in the cemetery, the tenderness and pity. Even in the darkness, small as she was, she had an imposing presence, an aura of mystery but also of consequence and prodigious wisdom, probably the same power with which great generals and holy women alike elicited sacrifice from their followers. And here, now, on the shore of the night sea, it was almost possible to believe that she had walked out of the deeps to the west, having breathed water as easily as she now breathed air, come to land with the wonderful secrets of another realm.

With her was a tall man in dark clothes. He was little more than a spectral form — except for masses of curly blond hair that shone faintly like sinuous strands of phosphorate seaweed.

Joe said, ‘Rose, are you all right?’

‘Just got . . . battered around a little,’ she said in a voice taut with pain.

‘I heard a shot,’ he worried. He wanted to touch her, but he wasn’t sure that he should. Then he found himself with his arms around her, holding her.

She groaned in pain, and Joe started to let go of her, but she put one arm around him for a moment, embracing him to let him know that in spite of her injuries she was grateful for his expression of concern. ‘I’m fine, Joe. I’ll be okay.’

Shouting rose in the distance, from the bluff top beside the restaurant. And from the beach to the south, the disabled agent replied, calling feebly for help.

‘Gotta get out of here,’ said the blond guy. ‘They’re coming.’

‘Who are you people?’ Rose asked.

Surprised, Joe said, ‘Aren’t they Mahalia’s crew?’

‘No,’ Rose said. ‘Never saw them before.’

‘I’m Mark,’ said the man with the curly blond hair, ‘and he’s Joshua.’

The black man — Joshua — said something that sounded like, ‘We’re both in finna face.’

Rose said, ‘I’ll be damned.’

‘Who, what? You’re in what?’ Joe asked.

‘It’s all right, Joe,’ Rose said. ‘I’m surprised but I probably shouldn’t be.’

Joshua said, ‘We believe we’re fighting on the same side, Dr. Tucker. Anyway, we have the same enemies.’

Out of the distance, at first as soft as the murmur of a heart, but then like the approaching hooves of a headless horseman’s steed, came the whump-whump-whump of helicopter rotors.

3

Having stolen nothing but their own freedom, they raced like fleeing thieves alongside the bluffs, which soared and then declined and then soared high again, almost as if mirroring Joe’s adrenaline levels.

While they were on the move, with Mark in the lead and Rose at his heels, Joe heard Joshua talking urgently to someone. He glanced back and saw the black man with a cell phone. Hearing the word car, he realized that their escape was being planned and coordinated even as it was unfolding.

Just when they seemed to have gotten away, the thumping promise of the helicopter became a bright reality to the south. Like a beam from the jewel eye of a stone-temple god angered by desecration, a searchlight pierced the night and swept the beach. Its burning gaze arced from the sandy cliffs to the foaming surf and back again, moving relentlessly toward them.

Because the sand was soft near the base of the palisades, they left shapeless impressions in it. Their aerial pursuers, however, wouldn’t be able to follow them by their footprints. Because this sand was never raked, as it might have been on a well-used public beach, it was disturbed by the tracks of many others who had come before them. If they had walked nearer the surf, in the area where higher tides had compacted the sand and left it smooth, their route would have been as clearly marked as if they’d left flares.

They passed several sets of switchback stairs leading to great houses on the bluffs above, some of masonry pinned to the cliff lace with steel, some of wood bolted to deep pylons and vertical concrete beams. Joe glanced back once and saw the helicopter hovering by one staircase, the searchlight shimmering up the treads and across the railings.

He figured that a team of hunters might already have driven north from the restaurant and gone by foot to the beach to work methodically southward. Ultimately, if Mark kept them on the strand like this, they would be trapped between the northbound chopper and the southbound searchers.

Evidently the same thought occurred to Mark, because he sud­denly led them to an unusual set of redwood stairs rising through a tall box frame. The structure was reminiscent of an early rocket gantry as built back when Cape Kennedy had been called Cape Canaveral, the spacecraft gone now and the architecture surround­ing a curious void.

While they ascended, they were putting no additional distance between themselves and the chopper, but it continued to approach. Two, four, six, eight flights of steep stairs brought them to a landing where they seemed horribly exposed. The helicopter, after all, was hovering no more than a hundred feet above the beach, which put it perhaps forty feet above them as they stood atop the bluff — and hardly a hundred and fifty yards to the south. The house next door had no stairs to the shore, which made this platform even more prominent. If either the pilot or the co-pilot looked to the right and at the bluff top instead of at the searchlight-splashed sand below, discovery could not be avoided.

The upper landing was surrounded by a six-foot-tall, wrought ­iron, gated security fence with a sharply inward-angled, spiked top to prevent unwanted visitors from gaining access by way of the beach below. It had been erected long ago in the days when the Coastal Commission didn’t control such things.

The helicopter was now little more than a hundred yards to the south, moving forward slowly, all but hovering. Its screaming engine and clattering rotors were so loud that Joe could not have made himself heard to his companions unless he shouted.

There was no easy way to climb the fence, not in the minute or two of grace they might have left. Joshua stepped forward with the doorbuster Desert Eagle, fired one round into the lock, and kicked the gate open.

The men in the helicopter could not have heard the gunshot, and it was unlikely that the sound was perceived in the house as anything more than additional racket caused by the aircraft. Indeed, every window was dark, and all was as still as though no one was home.

They passed through the gate into expansive estate-size property with low box hedges, formal rose gardens, bowl fountains currently dry, antique French terra-cotta walkways lit by bronze-tulip path lights, and multi-level terraces with limestone balustrades rising to a Mediterranean mansion. There were phoenix palms, ficus trees.

Massive California live oaks were underlit by landscape spots: magisterial, frost-and-black, free-form scaffoldings of branches.

Because of the artfulness of the landscape lighting, no glare spoiled any corner. The romantic grounds cast off tangled shawls of shadow, intricate laces of soft light and hard darkness, in which the four of them surely could not be seen by the pilots even as the helicopter now drew almost even with the bluff on which the estate made its bed.

As he followed Rose and Mark up stone steps onto the lowest terrace, Joe hoped that no security-system motion detectors were installed on the exterior of the enormous house, only within its rooms. If their passage activated kleigs mounted high in the trees or atop the perimeter walls, the sudden dazzle would draw the pilots’ attention.

He knew how difficult it could be even for a lone fugitive on foot to escape the bright eye of a police search chopper with a good and determined pilot — especially in comparatively open environs such as this neighbourhood, which didn’t offer the many hiding places of a city’s mazes. The four of them would be altogether too easy to keep pinpointed once they had been spotted.

Earlier, an on-shore breeze had come with the grace of gull wings from the sea; currently, the flow was off-shore and stronger. This was one of those hot winds, called Santa Anas, born in the mountains to the east, out of the threshold of the Mojave, dry and blustery and curiously wearing on the nerves. Now a loud whispering rose from the oaks, and the great fronds of the phoenix palms hissed and rattled and creaked as though the trees were warning one another of gales that might soon descend.

Joe’s fear of an outer security line seemed unwarranted as they hurriedly climbed another short flight of stone steps to the upper terrace. The grounds remained subtly lighted, heavily layered with sheltering shadows.

Out beyond the bluff’s edge, the search chopper was paral­lel with them, moving slowly northward. The pilots’ attention remained focused on the beach below.

Mark led them past an enormous swimming pool. The oil-black water glimmered with fluid arabesques of silver, as though schools of strange fish with luminous scales were swimming just beneath the surface.

They were still passing the pool when Rose stumbled. She almost fell hut regained her balance. She halted, swaying.

‘Are you all right?’ Joe asked worriedly.

‘Yes, fine, I’ll be okay,’ she said, but her voice was thin, and she still appeared to be unsteady.

‘How badly were you hurt back there?’ Joe pressed as Mark and Joshua gathered around.

‘Just knocked on my ass,’ she said. ‘Bruised a little.’

‘Rose—’

‘I’m okay, Joe. It’s just all this running, all those damn stairs up from the beach. I guess I’m not in as good a shape as I should be.’

Joshua was talking sotto voce on the cell phone again.

‘Let’s go,’ Rose said. ‘Come on, come on, let’s go.’

Beyond the bluff, above the beach, the helicopter was almost past the estate.

Mark led the way again, and Rose followed with renewed energy. They dashed under the roof of the arched loggia against the rear wall, where they were no longer in any danger of being spotted by the chopper pilots, and then to the corner of the house.

As they moved single-file along the side of the mansion on a walkway that serpentined through a small grove of shaggy-barked melaleucas, they were abruptly pinned in the bright beam of a big flashlight. Blocking the path ahead of them, a watchman said, ‘Hey, who the hell are—’

Acting without hesitation, Mark began to move even as the beam flicked on. The stranger was still speaking when Mark collided with him. The two men grunted from the impact.

The flashlight flew against the trunk of a melaleuca, rebounded onto the walkway, and spun on the stone, making shadows whirl like a pack of tail-chasing dogs.

Mark swivelled the startled watchman around, put a hammerlock on him, bum-rushed him off the sidewalk and through bordering flower beds, and slammed him against the side of the house so hard that the nearby windows rattled.

Scooping up the flashlight, Joshua directed it on the action, and Joe saw that they had been challenged by an overweight, uniformed security guard of about fifty-five. Mark pressed him to his knees and kept a hand on the back of his head to force his face down and away from them, so he couldn’t describe them later.

‘He’s not armed,’ Mark informed Joshua.

‘Bastards,’ the watchman said bitterly.

‘Ankle holster?’ Joshua wondered.

‘Not that either.’

The watchman said, ‘Stupid owners are pacifists or some damn thing. Won’t have a gun on the place, even for me. So now here I am.’

‘We’re not going to hurt you,’ Mark said, pulling him backwards from the house and forcing him to sit on the ground with his back against the trunk of a melaleuca.

‘You don’t scare me,’ the watchman said, but he sounded scared.

‘Dogs?’ Mark demanded.

‘Everywhere,’ the guard said. ‘Dobermans.’

‘He’s lying,’ Mark said confidently.

Even Joe could hear the bluff in the watchman’s voice. Joshua gave the flashlight to Joe and said, ‘Keep it pointed at the ground.’ Then he produced handcuffs from a fanny pack.

Mark directed the guard to reach in back of himself and clasp his hands behind the tree. The trunk was only about ten inches in diameter, so the guard didn’t have to contort himself, and Joshua snapped the cuffs on his wrists.

‘The cops are on the way,’ the watchman gloated.

‘No doubt riding Dobermans,’ Mark said.

‘Bastard,’ said the watchman.

From his fanny pack, Mark withdrew a tightly rolled Ace ban­dage. ‘Bite on this,’ he told the guard.