Fury and the Power (37 page)

When he continued to study her intently but without speaking Gwen cried out bitterly, "Just turn the lamp off for a little while. I promise I'll—"

"Stay? But you can't make promises to
me
, Gwen. Can you?" Her lips clamped whitely together. "It's Eden who makes all of the decisions for her dpg," Grayle said.

"Sure. You have it all figured out. Without Eden, I'm a big nothing."

"And you hate the restrictions of your situation. You even hate your homebody, at times."

Gwen had no reply. Today she hated everybody.

"What if we can get you free of Eden, so that you can be
Gwen
in more than name only? That's a promise I can make."

"Like hell you can," the hard metal of her spirit beginning to show through her self-pity. It felt good. "You don't understand doppelgangers at all. Neither does your so-called expert, whoever
that
is."

"Someone you know well, I believe. Maybe it's time for him to come in. I have a crowded schedule this afternoon."

Lincoln Grayle activated the cell phone he wore on one wrist like a slightly oversized diver's watch. He relayed a summons, then reached out and, to Gwen's relief, turned off the ultraviolet light.

"I know the effects will continue for several minutes, so you'll be good for now. Can you sit up? Wonderful, sweetheart."

"What's going on?" Gwen said suspiciously, working at keeping her woozy head up.

Double doors to the bedroom suite were opened. Dr. Marcus Woolwine walked in. Legs as bowed and muscular as ever, sunlight forming a nimbus around his deeply tanned bald head, flaring from the surfaces of his mirrored sunglasses.

Gwen blinked a couple of times, bringing him into sharp focus.

"Oh! God!"

"Hello, Gwen. Such a great pleasure to see you again. I would like to apologize for some of the things I once said to you.
A soulless facade, a fake, a nonbeing
. But, after all. It wasn't easy being forced to consume humble pie—a man of my stature in the remodeling business."

Dr. Woolwine was followed into the bedroom by a Chinese male anesthesiologist wearing OR scrubs, pushing a stainless-steel cart of meds and bags of IV saline solution dangling from a short pole.

Gwen's mouth was locked open at a grisly angle as he approached her, his bullet head thrust forward with a smile prepared to be ingratiating. She watched herself withdraw, tiny and insubstantial, in the twin convex mirrors concealing Woolwine's eyes.

"From the day we both, ah, found it sensible to flee from Plenty Coups," Woolwine said, "my interest in you has grown with each passing hour. I have the good fortune now to be in the employ of a man who shares my fascination with doppelgangers." He turned to Grayle with a courteous expression, unusual for a man with an ego to match his arrogance. As Gwen remembered him. "And now we are ready for her, at your pleasure."

"What are you going to do to me?" Gwen screamed at the magician. She was still too weak from the black light to get much lung power into her scream.

He sat down on the bed and gently ran a hand over her head, stroked a cheek with his fingertips.

"You'll soon have the life you've always wanted."

Grayle said reassuringly. "Disengaged at last, freed from the tyranny of a homebody. For your freedom, all I ask in return is a favor."

"Do
you
a favor? I'd rather vomit in my own eyes."

"But we'll talk more about that when I see you tomorrow."

3:20 P.M.

L
incoln Grayle had finished an arduous session on the parallel bars in his gym and was relaxing beneath the hands of his masseuse when Cornell Crigler was brought in to see him.

Grayle dismissed the masseuse and sat up naked on the side of the table, looking at the uneasy Cornell. "Tell me about your brother-in-law."

"Lewis is my half brother, Great One." Cornell, the childhood stutterer, needed when under duress to think about each word before he spoke. "I'm tuh-ten years older. We never really known each other all that well, although these days with E-mail it's easier keepin' in touch. I grew up in Chicago, and—"

"Let's keep to the point, Cornell. He's a detective with the Atlanta Police Department, you told Gaby. Why is he in Las Vegas asking questions about me?"

"Usin' some of his vacation time. He was a part of the Pledger Lee Skeldon murder investigation team. Case is closed, fuh-far as Atlanta PD is concerned. But Lewis, he made a connection between that case, the death of Sai Rampa in India, and the attempt on the Dalai Lama's life. Said to me last night, 'Cornell, I'm convinced the Pope also was attacked in Rome this week, but you won't hear a word; Vatican's too good at coverin' up when it threatens the stability of the church.' Right now Lewis is attempting to contact a few people on the Pope's invite list Tuesday. So I thought you ought to know—"

Grayle shrugged. "The connection Lewis has made leads straight to me. Which does explain his interest in the Lucky Ticket list that we gave out to his lovely companion."

Cornell said, looking everywhere except at the splendid body on display a few feet from him, "I did tell Lewis right off that he shouldn't mess with important people like yourself, since he don't have a thing to go on but suspicions."

"Cop smarts. Give Lewis credit, Cornell. No need to defend yourself. It's an awkward situation for you."

"Wuh-what do you want me to do, Great One?"

"Don't be nervous. I don't see that we have a problem. Other than to somehow make up for our bad luck in Rome. And it was all planned so carefully." Cornell's brow furrowed in commiseration. "But let's think about Lewis. He's clever and tenacious. Know what I think of clever people, Cornell?" He didn't wait for Cornell to finish shaking his head. "Never can get enough of them. So I look forward to meeting Lewis. And what's-her-name."

"Charmaine."

"Where are they staying?"

"Bahla."

"On the cheap, of course. Maybe, since one or the other of them is going to do me a favor soon, they should have choicer accommodations for the remainder of their stay. Their own pool, hot tub."

Cornell tried not to look puzzled or apprehensive. The blond masseuse had returned, wearing chrome-plated chains and manacles around her shoulders like an iron maiden's boa; forty pounds if they were an ounce, Cornell reckoned, but she didn't appear to even notice the weight. The masseuse was shapely and missed being beautiful because the iron in her Germanic soul blocked expression from her flawless face like a course of Botox.

She spent two and a half minutes locking Grayle into various contorted positions while Cornell, not yet dismissed, fretted silently, wondering if the chaining of Grayle was a prelude to some variation on kinky sex play that he might be forced to watch. Cornell was a Bad Soul, but he did have his druthers.

The magician and the masseuse, however, appeared to be all business as he supervised his heavy bondage, making suggestions as to how and where the chains could be tighter.

With the last padlock in place she helped Grayle down from the massage table. He was bent nearly double. He could move, only shuffling a few inches at a time and with great effort. The masseuse left again. Grayle made his way to the edge of a ten-foot-square pool. It looked deep.

"Do you have a watch, Cornell?"

"Yes, Great One."

"I'm going to sit on the bottom of the pool for a while, practice getting out of these chains. Let me know when eight minutes is up."

"
Eight
minutes? How do I do that?"

Grayle managed to look back over one shoulder, the shoulder that still contained bits of a .470 Kynoch slug and which hurt like hell. But he loved the pain. Pain was pride. Pain was money.

"Just jump in and holdup your fingers where I can see them, Cornell," the magician said as he began to concentrate, preparing his remarkable body for the ordeals ahead.

6:25 P.M.

A
fter his workout in the pool, from which he emerged thirty seconds ahead of schedule and just as Cornell was taking off his shoes, Lincoln Grayle napped, then shared a light supper with two members of his design team. They were working on an illusion that the magician called "The Gilded Cage." It also involved a perilous escape, with Grayle wrapped this time in barbed wire, adding to the degree of difficulty. He was to be dropped from the highest bridge in North America, which was in West Virginia, into a river chasm some five hundred feet below. He had conceived the Gilded Cage stunt two years ago. The design challenges were enormous. The Gilded Cage would replace the illusion for which he'd been denied access to the Colosseum in Rome. That production, now on the back burner, featured some comely female gladiators, a chariot drawn by six black horses, a pair of lions, and Grayle himself locked inside a body bag with ten pounds of raw liver.

Big, better, best. His perpetual quest as an illusionist. Always searching for an edge over his competitors. Dedication to his art kept his theatre filled every night while other Vegas magicians were closing up shop for lack of business.

When their working meal was over, Grayle rolled up two sets of plans for further study, had a second glass of sauvignon blanc from his Napa Valley winery poured for him. He leaned back in a leather lounge chair on one of the glass-walled terraces with retractable roofs to watch the high-desert sunset flare metallic green along a saw-toothed black horizon. He listened, as he did most nights when he was home, to Christmas music and parodies. He loved Eartha Kitt's seductive "Santa Baby," Burl Ives's jovial "Jingle Bell Rock," and never tired of the tragicomic bonhomie of "Granma Got Run Over by a Reindeer."

Marcus Woolwine found him there. Woolwine had allowed himself only the slightest smile of satisfaction, as if he were fearful that his eighty-year-old face might cramp if the smile got any wider. But obviously he was pleased with himself.

"Would you care to see her now?"

"She's awake?"

"No, no. She needs to sleep for another twelve hours. The minor surgery is done, and we're mentally prepping her to accept her new status, giving no further thought to Eden Waring."

"Her new status and my proposal?"

"Only Lincoln Grayle, and his desires, will matter to Gwen when she awakens."

"No more of this 'I'd rather vomit in my own eyes'? Fab. No wonder you came so highly recommended by Bronc Skarbeck."

"How did you happen to meet the General?" Woolwine asked.

"After the Multiphasic Operations and Research Group imploded, Bronc was casting around for someone else to sell his soul to, and I offer unmatchable terms."

"I'm also indebted for the opportunity you've given me, to study a doppelganger in such detail. She
will
be mine, once she has fulfilled her obligations to you?"

"Certainly, Dr. Woolwine."

The sky had darkened, stars appearing like flecks of silver in a miner's pan. Grayle finished his sauvignon blanc and followed Woolwine, who in spite of his age bounded like a pneumatic mountain goat up a double flight of outside steps to the wing of the house that Grayle had turned over to the biogeneticist.

In a large room decorated with exotic cacti growing like crude homunculi Gwen lay face up and completely nude except for a surgical patch on one side of her neck in a mild yellow-green soup of mineral salts more buoyant than ordinary seawater. She was wired to murmurous machines and taking on clear fluids through the IV needle in the back of one hand. There were sunlamps ten feet above the shallow tank in which she serenely floated, breathing almost undetectably, but no ultraviolet light. Her overall deep tan had a beautiful luster, like the painstakingly applied paint jobs to hobby cars. Her dulse-red hair also floated, fanlike, on soothing currents that rippled through the gelatinous solution.

"Why can I see her?" Grayle said. "Doppelgangers in the nude are invisible unless you catch them in black light."

"Her skin and hair are sheathed in an organic compound that maintains the integrity of her image within the spectrum visible to the human eye. I obtained the formula from a Yaqui sorcerer accustomed to dealing with dpg's in his own work. The compound binds to the skin in a layer a few microns thick, hardened by a gentle electrical stimulus, the source of which is the billions of microorganisms in her salty bath. The compound, however, begins to break down after a couple of weeks."

"So she can't disappear on me when she wakes up."

"Had she the desire to do so, where could she go? Back to Eden Waring? The device I've implanted in her neck alters her magnetic field just enough to cancel contact between Gwen and her homebody. Gwen is no longer 'on call,' shall we say."

He paused to mop his steamy bald dome with a paisley handkerchief. It was both hot and humid inside. There were half-moons of moisture on the inner surfaces of Woolwine's mirror lenses. "Isn't she lovely, though? I'm nearly persuaded to jumpstart my libido again, in spite of the potential consequences at my age." Grayle gave him a look. "That is, unless you had a sexual relationship with Gwen in mind. Female dpg's are barren, of course."