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"I guess you don't like small talk," Macklin said.

  Ortiz nudged him with the gun. "Open your door."

  Macklin pushed open the door. Muddy water splashed into the moving car. "If you wanted fresh air, you could have just asked me nicely."

  "Jump out," Ortiz said.

  Macklin sighed and looked glumly at the man. "You aren't Captain Ortiz."

  "Brilliant deduction," the man said, "now jump."

  Macklin hesitated. He knew it had been too good to be true. No one can step off a plane, kill a couple men two minutes later, and then expect to be politely escorted past customs into a waiting car without any hassles.

  How could I be so goddamn stupid? I deserve to be tossed out of a moving car.

  The man cocked the gun. "You either jump out or I blow you out."

  "Shit," Macklin hissed, and tumbled out of the car. His body slammed into the cobblestone, knocking the breath out of him. He rolled off the embankment in a waterfall of sludge and dropped facefirst into a pool of mud.

  He flopped over onto his back and lay there stunned for a moment, his eyes closed and face caked with mud. He could feel the coarse, dirty water riding over his skin like sandpaper. The raindrops felt like stones pummeling his body.

  Welcome to Mexico, Macky boy.

  He was starting to rise when a crushing weight on his neck forced him back down with a splash. His eyes flew open, and through the haze of rain, mud, and dizziness, he saw himself surrounded by trees. But no, they weren't trees, he realized—they were men. Macklin, barely able to breathe under the boot mashing his throat, to make out the dark human shape towering over him, grabbed the man's ankle and futilely tried to lift the boot off his throat. His lungs ached for air. Raindrops and dizziness clouded his vision. He couldn't get his arms to operate properly.

  The men drew in close around him and simultaneously began kicking him. His body jerked between the men and he lost his grasp on the man's ankle. His arms fell like broken tree limbs to the ground. He was utterly helpless, a sack of flesh for them to stomp into bloody mush.

  They're killing me . . .

  His consciousness drowned in the inky blackness of agony.

  # # # # # #

  Southern California

  Wednesday, June 12 / Thursday, June 13

  The old yellow school bus pulled off the eerily empty highway and bumped along through the black desert night on an unlit private road. Despite the jostling, of the two dozen people aboard, only Jessica Mordente and one teenage boy were awake. He was in the back, puking up his dinner into a plastic Ralph's grocery bag.

  All Mordente could see out of her window was darkness. Her head was tilted against the glass, her cheek pressed to the cold, smooth surface. She could feel the vibration of the engine trembling in her larynx.

  She'd lost track of time. How many hours ago was she wandering down Hollywood Boulevard, a lost look on her face? How long since they had found her, embraced her, cajoled her into coming to their white house on stilts that faced the beach?

  She ate their dinner, drank their wine, soaked up their reassuring words. She filed onto the bus with the rest of the lonely people they had found, the people who had never heard of the TALC before but were ready to join it if it would just end their desperation.

  How long until they arrived at the Talcon Colony? Hours? Days? No, she knew it couldn't be days. She knew where it was. It was in the desert somewhere . . . right? Mordente reminded herself that she was different from the others on the bus. She wasn't a lonely waif. She was a reporter.

  Mordente tried to feel the immensity of the Los Angeles Times, the power of journalistic responsibility, lifting her up. It didn't work. The newsprint, the presses, and the green, luminescent letters on her VDT screen seemed far away.

  Her eyes stung with fatigue, her butt ached from sitting so long, and her head felt heavy; they all were signals for her to let her body switch off. She knew she should be sleeping, but something kept her awake—curiosity, perhaps, and the desire not to give in to sleep as the others had. After all, she reminded herself again, she was different.

  The bus turned, the motion swaying her body and lifting her cheek away from the glass. The gray wall of the Talcon Colony was revealed in the arc of the bus's headlights.

  The driver honked twice. A simple iron gate, the only break in a sandblasted stone wall, swung open, and it became daylight in the desert. Dozens of hidden floodlights burst on atop the ten-foot stone wall and from their mountings in surrounding rocks and foliage.

  An austere, pastel-colored hacienda with a faded, red-tile roof seemed to rise out of the night as the bus turned into the compound. Two unimaginative, barrack-style wings jutted from the main house. Mordente guessed they were built later, judging by the incongruence they created when matched with the hacienda.

  The bus stopped with a lurch that made everyone on board jerk forward and wake up. Gears screeched, the engine coughed to death, and the doors folded back, letting the chilly desert suck the warmth out of the bus.

  Mike, one of the TALC guys who had befriended Mordente on Hollywood Boulevard, popped into the aisle from one of the front seats. He looked about twenty-five and exuded so much energy, it looked to Mordente like a spotlight was on him. He was the sort of clean-cut type you find all over Provo, Utah, and wore a beige button-down oxford and a maroon sweater. His hands were half-buried in the pockets of his faded blue jeans, so his arms were crooked at the elbows, giving his upper body a sheepish, golly-gee-whiz hunch. His rubber-tipped, blue canvas tennis shoes added to the impression.

  "Here we are, my new friends," he said, his smile unwavering. "You're with family now."

  The Mike clones, who also worked for TALC, were sprinkled throughout the bus and clapped enthusiastically, stoking applause in their new charges.

  "Total awareness and a new life"—he paused for effect—"begin now."

  The brilliant white light that bathed the compound spilled through the bus doorway, casting a glow that reminded Mordente of the gaping entrance to the mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Mike swept his right arm towards the door, bidding them all to step through the gateway to a better way of life. Mordente expected to hear a chorus of angels at any moment.

  She hid her cynicism behind a mask of blank acceptance and shuffled out of the bus obediently with the others. She shielded her face with her arm against the painful glare from the klieg lights mounted on the sprawling hacienda's rooftop. If she squinted, she could make out two figures standing on the veranda across from the bus.

  One wore a turban and sunglasses, apparently mistaking the klieg lights for the scorching desert sun. He was a few yards away but his body odor seeped out of his khaki shirt, which was unbuttoned to his belly. Mordente figured his shirt was gaping open because he was afraid he'd snag all that chest hair in the buttons. Or suffocate in his own BO.

  The man beside him, Mordente assumed, had no nasal passages. He was also a lot more relaxed, casually dressed in a gray sweatshirt and faded blue jeans. Mordente squinted at Mr. Arab and Mr. Relaxed and wondered when the TALC leader, Fraser Nebbins, would make his grand appearance.

  "Howdy," Mr. Relaxed said, plunging his hands into his pockets and shuffling forward to the veranda steps. "I'm Fraser Nebbins."

  Mordente was caught completely off guard. Where was the full-size, glib prototype from which Mike and his legion of clones were born? Where was the smooth talker armored in three-piece Yves Saint Laurent who danced like John Travolta around press inquires? Where was the pomp, the show, the bullshit?

  Nebbins stood in front of the line of street urchins like a general facing his troops. "I welcome you, my brothers and sisters, into our family." A smile rich in family warmth bloomed on his face. "Here you will have the peace and freedom to explore your inner selves and experience total awareness." He walked down the line of people, smiling at each of them, shaking hands, stroking hair. "These walls, and the brothers and sisters carrying firearms, aren't here to keep you in. The
y are here to keep the corruption and disease that's out there . . . out there."

  Meek chuckles rippled through the line and Mordente felt her pulse quicken anxiously as Nebbins approached her.

  "It isn't long before you forget life out there completely." He reached out his hand to Mordente's cheek and lightly stroked it. "Sleep well, everyone. Tomorrow you begin new lives."

  Mordente lowered her head shyly and followed the others towards the rear of the hacienda. Nebbins crossed his arms under his chest, his eyes admiring the smooth curves of Mordente's slim body as she disappeared around the building's edge.

  Achmed Sabib stepped quietly to Nebbins' side.

  "She's stunning," Nebbins muttered.

  Sabib absently scratched the hair on his chest. "Yes, she'll fetch us a good price."

  Nebbins shared a grin with his friend. "Let's give her a test drive ourselves first, eh?"

  They clapped their arms around each other and laughed quietly as they walked back into the hacienda, the floodlights clicking off behind them and submerging the colony in blackness once again.

  # # # # # #

  Jessica Mordente knew what was happening to her. They were breaking her. And she didn't know how much longer she could hold on to her sanity.

  The cell was pitch-black. The only light she saw was when she closed her eyes. Then it was the Fourth of July. The fireworks were dazzling, almost hypnotic, and she was afraid of it. When she opened her eyes, the colorful explosions of brilliant brightness disappeared. So she kept her eyes open and hungered for the light.

  When she first entered the barracks (how long ago was that?), three men grabbed her and hit her until she was nearly unconscious. She was aware of them stripping off her clothes and jamming a needle in her arm.

  Then everything was warm and she couldn't move. Her thoughts became disjointed, and everything she saw looked like reflections in a carnival Fun House mirror. They carried her down a cramped, dimly lit corridor that was hot with the smell of human sweat. They tossed her into a concrete cell. A single lightbulb entwined in cobwebs dangled from the ceiling. It had been on then. There was no window, no bed, no toilet. Just a hole in the center of the room.

  The light went out before her head cleared. She crawled into a corner and curled up, shivering, staring into the blackness. She heard the ringing. It began softly at first and then became louder. It wouldn't go away. It just droned on and on, incessantly, drilling into her skull. She was sure that once it got inside, even if they turned off the sound, it would never go away.

  She wasn't claustrophobic before, but now she could feel the unseen walls closing in on her in the darkness, pushing out the air, smothering her. Her breathing became deep and hungry, her lungs aching for air.

  She closed her eyes against the fear and the brilliant whiteness returned, bathing her in an intense, soothing glow. A tingling sensation rode up her legs and traveled everywhere, across her chest, under her arms, over her lips. It felt like . . .

  Her quivering hands rose to her face and she felt the hard insect bodies scurrying across her skin, into her hair, down her neck. She screamed hysterically and bounced herself madly off the cell walls until she collapsed, quivering, onto the floor and let the white light in her head claim her.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

  Thursday, June 13, 11:32 a.m.

  "You should have listened to Karl Malden, Harv," Ivy Goldblatt said as they shuffled down the cobblestone road, adjusting her tube top every few steps. "We wouldn't be in this mess if we had American Express."

  She punctuated her sentences by poking her husband in the shoulder with her index finger. It didn't bother him. Thirteen years of marriage to her had left tiny calluses all over his body. Other people, though, left conversations with Ivy looking like they'd been pistol-whipped.

  "Shut up, Ivy." Harv shuffled along the embankment, his body hunched under the oppressive midmorning heat. "It doesn't make a goddamn difference what kind of checks we had. The goddamn bandito didn't ask me what was in the wallet before he lifted it, Ivy."

  "Listen, mouth, where are you going to get a refund on Wanderin' Joe's traveler's checks here? Huh?"

  "Yeah, and if you hadn't handed every goddamn peso we had to every goddamn street hoodlum selling phony jewelry, we could hail a fucking taxi."

  His sunburned face felt like someone had used it for a pin cushion. The six coats of medicated Noxzema he had applied to his face that morning hadn't done a damn thing except make him smell funny. He was frustrated, uncomfortable, and tired and had to piss so bad he was afraid if he stopped moving his bladder would burst.

  Some vacation.

  "We should have taken the Love Boat cruise, Harv." Ivy poked him in the ribs and pulled up her tube top. "This is all your fault."

  "That's it." Harv stopped, turned his back to the road, and started unbuckling his pants. "I'm gonna water the plants."

  He unzipped his fly and fumbled with the flap in his underwear.

  "Harv!" Ivy shrieked. "You can't do that. We're in a foreign country."

  "Just watch the goddamn road or I'll whiz on you."

  Harv sighed contentedly as he relieved himself off the edge of the embankment. He admired the nice, fine stream of urine spraying into the foliage and remembered those great high school piss contests. They used to see who could stand farthest from the toilet and still piss into it.

  He always won. He was the undisputed Pissmaster.

  Harv peered into the brush to see what he was drilling into. He was probably pounding some boulder into sand with his manly spray. But then he saw that it wasn't a rock he was hitting. It was a body.

  "Holy shit." Harv's eyebrows climbed up his forehead. He let go of himself and stood very still, pissing into his shoe.

  # # # # # #

  1:00 p.m.

  The two attendants slid the stretcher carrying a bloodied, unconscious Brett Macklin into the white, '71 Cadillac ambulance and slammed the door shut.

  Captain Jacob Ortiz combed his fingers through his shoulder-length brown hair and watched the ambulance shriek away down the street towards the hospital.

  This Brett Macklin was one unlucky guy. And so, it seemed, were his friends—Ortiz had reread the autopsy report on Mort Suderson on his way over.

  Although he couldn't prove it yet, Ortiz knew Macklin had thwarted the hijacking. All right, so the police hadn't been able to form a composite drawing from all the disparate descriptions they got from the passengers. But Macklin's plane had just landed and he would have been walking to the terminal at the time of the hijacking.

  By the time Ortiz had showed up at the airport, the place was in pandemonium and Macklin was already gone. The man pretending to be Ortiz disappeared with Macklin before airport security realized they had been tricked.

  Ortiz believed there was no connection between the hijacking and Macklin's abduction by the imposter. An unfortunate coincidence. In a way, he was glad Macklin was there. Macklin handled himself well. Too well. Christ, it was like Macklin was just swatting flies. Clearly, this was no ordinary man. And someone, a real pro, was going to a lot of trouble, risk, and expense to make life miserable for him.

  But to what end? Why was Macklin still alive?

  Ortiz loosened his red leather tie and opened his black-checked shirt at the collar. Ivy Goldblatt poked him in the chest, intruding into his thoughts, and once again he was listening to her drone.

  "Okay, Mrs. Goldblatt," he interrupted. "I'll see if I can contact this guy, ah"—he looked at his notepad—"Karl Malden, for you about your traveler's checks."

  "No, no," she said, stabbing him twice with her finger, "It's Wandering Joe. He's the one."

  "All right, Wandering Joe, then." Ortiz put up his hands defensively to ward off any more blows. "I assure you, we won't leave you to roam the streets penniless."

  "Thank you. You're very understanding considering we come from two different cultures," she said.

  "We don't.
I'm on loan from the LAPD," Ortiz said. "I'm the law enforcement version of an exchange student."

  "You don't dress like a police officer," Ivy said with challenging eyes.

  "I don't have to." Ortiz grinned. "They expect American cops to be different."

  "But you're Mexican, aren't you?" Harv asked, studying his face.

  "A Judeo-Mex-American." Ortiz grinned. He loved saying that to people.

  Ivy Goldblatt paled. "You're Jewish?"

  Ortiz nodded.

  "Captain Ortiz?" an officer yelled behind him.

  "Excuse me," Ortiz said to the Goldblatts and went to the car. "What is it, Mendoza?" he asked the officer in Spanish.

  "They've located Sergeant Shaw," Mendoza replied. "They've got him on the phone at the station."

  "Tell them to keep him on the line," Ortiz said. "I'm on my way."

  # # # # # #

  Achmed Sabib, his arms folded under his chest, stared into Jessica Mordente's empty eyes. She stood, naked, just an inch away from him, her gaze trained on some distant dimension outside of Nebbins' wood-paneled study.

  "She's gone," Sabib marveled, waving his hand in front of her expressionless face. She had been washed, her skin moisturized, her hair shampooed, and her teeth brushed.

  "Oh, she's still here." Nebbins petted her shiny, fluffy hair and looked at Sabib over her tan shoulder. "Just enough of her, anyway, to pleasure us and our buyers. Think of her as a warm, giving robot."

  Sabib slapped his palm between her legs. Mordente didn't react. "I could stuff a hot poker in her and she'd never notice."

  Nebbins' lips stretched into a malefic grin. "That's the idea, isn't it?"

  "Nobody wants an empty bag of flesh, Nebbins."

  "Don't worry, Achmed." Nebbins walked around Mordente and clapped Sabib reassuringly on the shoulder. "She's still a fetus."

  Nebbins stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. "My perfect program of deprivation, malnutrition, isolation, and drugs will make her unusually receptive to suggestion and manipulation without damaging her capacity for hard labor or sexual functioning." He strode to an overstuffed leather chair across the room and sat down, draping a leg over one of the armrests. "That's what makes my product the Mercedes of the mass-market slave trade."