Black Heart, page 76
Tracy found himself three doors east of the Macomber residence. He watched the thin traffic as well as the pedestrians, turning his head and moving as he scanned the faces so that he looked perfectly natural, a stroller interested in this section of the city. Fixity in anything was to be avoided, Jinsoku had impressed on him. Fluidity to be strived for. The thing was to sink in with the surroundings, to blend in to such an extent that you became part of the place.
The sky was cloudless overhead, just the trace of sere nimbostratus over to the west near the tops of the low buildings. The atmosphere was light and clean, almost as if the recent storms had scrubbed the air. There was no carbon monoxide to make the breath short.
Two cars came towards him, one light, the other dark, and he turned his head away as a matter of course, stopping to casually scan the buildings' architecture.
Bells, missing a beat or two here and there, sounded in the air, clear and sharp, hanging for an instant like puffs of smoke before dissipating. St George's Church was just on the far side of the park, on Gramercy Park North. He saw several people walking up its steps, push through its doors. He glanced at his
watch: 8 p.m.
His head was down as the limo pulled up in front of Macomber's house. Without missing a step, he turned in at the house just east of it, hid himself in shadows.
He could see the gleaming front grill, reflecting the streetlights, leopard spots on its shiny flanks. The license plate read:
MAC i.
The driver got out, came around in front of the grill, stooped to open the near-side passenger door. Tracy saw Delmar Davis Macomber emerge from the limo's depths. Though he had not
712
P
seen the man in almost fourteen years, he could not have missed him. The tall frame, the wide square shoulders, the straight back, the fluid motion of the hips. No, he did not even have to see the face to know it was Macomber. But he did catch a flash Of burnished cheek, a line of moustache, before the other turned to go up the front steps of his house.
Tracy saw the ornate wrought-iron gates, the spiked gas lamps burning real flame, the short square balcony emerging from just below the second storey leaded glass window. Macomber had already gone inside but he saw that a frontal approach was out of the question. There was far more illumination for one thing. For another, there was a space of perhaps ten feet just inside the gate when he would have been totally without protection.
He knew there to be only one other possibility and he searched for it now. Macomber's house was one of many built at the turn of the century. Times and customs were entirely different then. Many of the wealthy had stables behind their houses and while over the years these had been either razed or turned into a second, smaller dwelling, their narrow entrances had been kept principally because of their quaint, old-fashioned look.
Tracy found this entrance on the easterly border of the house, a brick and masonry arch perhaps three feet wide closed off by a custom-made mahogany and iron door. It was locked, of course, but that was no problem.
Penetration.
He searched for an alarm, found none. It took Tracy a little over forty seconds to snap the lock. During that time only three people passed: a couple and one old man, hands in his pockets, his head down, deep in contemplation. None of them noticed him.
He stepped quickly through, closed the narrow door behind him. He found himself in a cramped courtyard. Directly ahead was where the stables had been. A well-tended garden grew there now, filled with trees and shrubbery.
He stayed close to the side of the building, moving cautiously until he encountered the concrete edge he had been searching for; a side entrance to the basement.
713
A flight of six steep concrete stairs plunged precipitously down into the earth. The door was padlocked. He felt around the edges of the frame until he found the concealed wires. There were two of them, entwined. He knew if he cut one, the alarm would sound. If he cut the other, he would deactivate it. J-jjs father had taught him that.
He ran his fingertips along the wires until they parted company. One went up, the other straight down to what he was sure was the activating box. If he cut that one, the alarm would sound. He retraced his steps, picked up the wire that went up
He cut it.
A siren sounding from Third Avenue where Cabrini Medical Center stood. Cicadas buzz-sawed, shimmering the air with sound. Otherwise silence.
He went to work on the lock and went through the door. He closed it behind him, was about to move, when he scented something, stood stock still. His heart beat fast and his breathing came hot. He felt the electronic bug like a knuckled fist directly on his breastbone. He resisted an urge to paw beneath the buttons of his shirt, rip it from its taped resting
spot.
He used a pencil flash in the darkness confronting him, the ribbon of light seeming almost solid as it wove its way through
the blackness.
It lit up exercise material: mats, a heavy punch bag, a length of thick rope hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Free weights, wooden bars, two pieces of wooden stick.
Tracy walked over to these. He donned a surgeon's glove gift from Thwaite - rolled each over. There were no stains, though the sides were dented here and there. They had obviously been used but on Moira? Tracy thought not. Unless wax had been used, it would have been impossible to get the bloodstains off before they seeped into the porous wood.
But now that he had crossed the basement, that smell was stronger and he played the beam of light in a shallow arc, moving slowly. The narrowness of the beam made identification difficult, especially from a distance.
He saw a pile of bricks and, above them, a dark space in the
7H
^all- Shine of light like a coin. A reflection. And he moved cjoser. He moved the pinpoint beam a fraction of an inch at a jme until the entire area had been exposed to him. The stench vvas very strong now.
Tracy went down on his haunches. He slid the beam up again to the face. Who was she? The features were bloated and jjiutilated beyond their normal configuration. Whoever she had jeen, he thought, she had died horribly.
But what was she doing lying here, decomposing in Vlacomber's house? That was a question he could not begin to answer. 'Thwaite,' he whispered, 'there's a corpse in the cellar. :emale, Caucasian. In her late thirties, I'd say, though it's hard to tell. Five-seven or -eight. No idea who she is.'
Macomber and Khieu had been so careful until now. He ooked above his head. What was going on up there? He went away from the stinking corpse, moving cautiously towards the wooden staircase. He ascended, weighting each step carefully fti case the old wooden boards creaked.
He came to the top of the stairway, reached forward until his ingertips encountered the knob, he gripped it, turning it slowly. He pushed the door outward, breathing in the clearer air of the house itself. He smelled wood polish and tobacco.
The lights were off downstairs except for one lamp on a table off to his left in the entrance hall. In its partial glow, he began to take in the character of the place.
It was still. He could make out the sound of a clock ticking somewhere not far off. He stopped where he was, holding his jreath. What was that just beneath the clock's ticking? It sounded to him like chanting. A Buddhist's prayer.
Then nothing. He began to move. He could hear voices above his head, muffled and indistinct. An abrupt shout and the thunderous sound of a pistol shot, caught by the interior walls, thrown back upon itself, echoing down the narrow corridors, expanding.
Tracy sprinted for the staircase to the upper storey.
Hn Macomber walked into his house, he had the impression '"'pomething was amiss. He stood silhouetted by the street
B 715
lights in the open doorway, his keys in one hand and knew that an aspect of the house had been subtly altered.
The first thing he thought of was Tracy Richter but then the sixth sense that had served him so well in the jungles of Cambodia took full hold and he knew better.
He closed the door behind him, walked softly, slowly through his possession, searching for a break in the known and time-worn pattern. While most other people would have instinctively called out, Macomber did precisely the opposite Whatever was amiss inside his house, he wanted to pinpoint its location, identify it and neutralize it. To do that he knew he had to maintain an absolute silence. If he was not there, it could not harm him. And it did wish him harm, of that he was quite
certain.
One lamp was on in the hallway, otherwise the house seemed dark. He was about to canvass the ground floor when he passed by the staircase leading to the upper floors. He heard the Buddhist prayers, his thin lips repeating soundlessly the litany he had
heard so often.
He put one hand on the shiny banister. Halfway up, he saw that the hall light was on, its illumination slinking down the steps, brightening them one by one as he ascended.
He did not like being in the light but there was nothing he could do about it. He moved more quickly now, making only a minimum of sound. He was glad that Khieu was home where he could keep an eye on him. It meant, too, that Tracy had not yet returned from Hong Kong. Macomber had no doubt that Khieu would carry out his instructions.
He was on the landing now, about to turn towards Khieu's room, when he noticed that the door to Eliott's old room was open. It was not supposed to be open. Khieu was not in there, he knew. The chanting was coming from the other end of the
hallway.
Macomber walked swiftly down the hall, his shadow falling back behind him like a finger pointing towards the room where Khieu sat praying. He reached the doorsill, began to reach in for the knob when silence descended. The chanting had abruptly ceased.
716
p
In that instant of stillness, Macomber could sense movement in front of him. Someone or something was in Eliott's room. He squinted but the lack of light made it impossible to discern even shadows. But he felt a ripple of air, a current of movement and the short hairs at the back of his neck rose. He was moving as Eliott squeezed the trigger of the loaded pistol, his eyes tightly shut as if to block out the aftermath of the deed.
The pistol's report was deafening but Macomber had shut all sound out. He moved now purely by instinct. It was how he had survived in the jungle.
His left arm was fully extended, the fingers scraping the wallpaper for the light switch, while his right hand had snaked beneath his suit jacket for the knife he always carried with him. Burst of illumination and his target was sighted all within the space of a fraction of a second. Recognition would come later. The balance of the knife was slipping through his extended fingers, the muscles of his arm guiding its flight. A brief whistle and it dived on a line.
Eliott opened his eyes expecting to find Khieu's outstretched form sliding across the doorsill. Instead he saw his father, his face oddly blurred. He opened his mouth to shout but the blur had expanded to fill his vision. Pain and concussion rocked him simultaneously and he lost his balance, spinning around so that he faced the wall where a print of Robert DeNiro had hung until the day he had moved out. Now only a light rectangle remained, as if a void had sprung up and now he seemed to be pitching headfirst through that void. Vision faded and it seemed as if he was crying crimson tears.
He felt nothing. He was a feather, lighter than air. He floated off the floor. His heart stuttered and his thoughts, tangled and confused, slid down through the thoroughfares of his brain to mesh with that primaeval pulse. Soon, that, too, ceased to exist.
Macomber cried out wildly just as the knife left his fingertips. Recognition had followed response, stepping on its coattails and Macomber made a futile, off-balance lunge towards his target K if he thought, absurdly, that he could catch up with and deflect the flight of the thrown weapon.
717
He could do no such thing, of course, and the lunge merely brought him three steps closer to the result of his action.
'Eliott,' he whispered, confused. He saw the pistol slide from his son's limp fingers, gasped at the gout of blood the entering knife made in Eliott's face. There had been no time to think, to judge, to determine. Just a sense of danger, blossoming. Perhaps he had scented the light film of oil on the gun. That combined with the blind movement he had sensed had been more than enough. Somewhere in the pit of his mind, where the organism struggles to maintain life, he had known he was about to be shot at. He had acted in the only manner he was capable of. He had protected the organism, ceding volition and control to that instinctive part of him that did not care who was threatening it.
It did not matter that he might be dead now had he not ceded control. He only knew that he had killed his son. He was on his knees, cradling Eliott's limp form, flinging the knife away from him, across the room, hearing its metallic skitter and shuddering at the sound.
Eliott's eyes were open and he was still breathing but there was no recognition there. He saw but what it was he saw, Macomber could not say. He had seen that gaze many times in his past and he knew what it foretold. There was no hope, no time. Nothing was left of his son, his one and only beloved treasure who he had once thought to forge into his own image. Now he would have settled for life and life only. It was too large a request. And for the first time in his life, he felt totally powerless.
He was weeping and he did not know it, would not perhaps have believed it had anyone told him what he was doing. He grieved for Eliott but he thought it was an internal process only. Nothing could affect his exterior. Nothing.
He sensed movement behind him, paid no attention to it for a moment. Then he swivelled around.
'Father?' Khieu's voice was soft. He was clothed but barefoot. He moved one step into the room, two, using the edges of his soles. He made no sound. 'I heard the shot of a pistol.'
'It was Eliott,' Macomber said, still unbelieving. 'Eliott tried to shoot me!'
718
'Is that so?' Khieu's voice was like velvet. 'I'm so very sorry."
Macomber's head came up and his eyes were bleak, all the colour draining out of them. 'How can it be?" he asked. 'All the careful planning, the meticulous failsafe mechanisms built into the angka. None of it's worth a damn now. How did it happen, Khieu?'
'Karma, Father.'
'But my son -' He took a halting step forward, anguish stitched like a scar across his face. 'Khieu, you don't understand! My son tried to shoot me ... I ... I killed himl My God, can't you comprehend that?'
Khieu gazed lovingly at Macomber, his soul drinking greedily in the outpouring of raw emotion. 'As I said, Father. Karma. You have extra-ordinary karma.'
'I shit on your karmal' Macomber cried. Blood returned to his face as anger took him. 'I shit on all your goddamned Buddhist ways! What the hell are they in the face of what's happening to all of us now?'
'Peace,' Khieu said calmly.
And Macomber looked up at him, his teary eyes focusing at last. He felt the beginnings of the emanations coming from his adopted son and, as he felt the rising force of them, a cold fist clutched painfully at his heart, constricting it. His face was a sudden mask and his mind whirled with a thousand questions. 'What..." For a moment he could not go on, fear and anxiety and, above all, the power of the unknown congealing the words in his throat, choking him. 'What's going on?'
The end of all things,' Khieu said as he began to move. The light from the hallway was a brilliant vast halo, as if a visible representation of his enormous inner strength. 'You look surprised, Father. I cannot think why. I am what you have made me. Only what you have made me.' His eyes were burning with a dark liquid fire. 'You have fashioned all that you see about you -' His outspread arms like black predator's wings. 'The death °f your son ... He thought you were me, you see. I told him 'wanted to die.' ' What're you saying?'
719
'Oh, the pain I see on your face, Father.' Moving still, constantly moving. 'It is real now. As real as the pain I carry inside me every day. You should die for what you've done to me and to Samnang. You betrayed him, Father, then flew in on steel wings to save me ... to pull me out, give me a new life. You killed Sam's murderers but first you killed him. Eliott told me
all of it. He-'
'Lies!' Macomber screamed. 'I don't know where he got those ideas. But they're all lies. Eliott hates me. He '
'He got those lies from these,' Khieu said, brandishing the papers and Macomber staggered back, silenced. 'Where?' he whispered. 'How?'
'But really Father, I don't wish death on you. Not you who gave me life when there was only destruction all around me. You who took me out of the hell of war and brought me ... here.' Khieu was slipping away, slipping ... 'No, it is infinitely better that you live with what you've done, so that every day, every night when you try to sleep and cannot you will remember the moment of your son's death, reliving it over and over. And when you do sleep there will be only the dreams of that moment, repeating over and over until you cannot bear it any longer and sanity begins to slip away. There is the end of your life, Father.'
Macomber was standing, wide-eyed, wondering how it was that Khieu was no longer under his control. When ... ? Then he remembered. He opened his mouth. 'It began when you went back. I know it did. You must tell me what happened to you in Cambodia. I must knowl'
'Your time of demanding is gone, Father. Along with your power. It ebbs away from you with every breath you take, with every beat of your heart.' He disappeared into the light, his black silhouette melting away as if it had never existed.
'Wait!' Macomber cried, stricken. 'Don't go!' For he knew, just as he had the first time he had seen Khieu as a teenager had seen what the boy was capable of- that nothing was possible without him, not the angka, not his dream of ultimate control, not the life he had chosen for himself. And he had chosen this. Karma.
720
f The cooling corpse of his son he cradled so gently in his Ipowerful arms was proof enough that this was so. God curse liarma for all time, he thought, rocking slowly. He longed to get tup and go after Khieu but he could not. He could not yet bring himself to let go of his son, as if his presence now would be of 'some comfort to Eliott.
The sky was cloudless overhead, just the trace of sere nimbostratus over to the west near the tops of the low buildings. The atmosphere was light and clean, almost as if the recent storms had scrubbed the air. There was no carbon monoxide to make the breath short.
Two cars came towards him, one light, the other dark, and he turned his head away as a matter of course, stopping to casually scan the buildings' architecture.
Bells, missing a beat or two here and there, sounded in the air, clear and sharp, hanging for an instant like puffs of smoke before dissipating. St George's Church was just on the far side of the park, on Gramercy Park North. He saw several people walking up its steps, push through its doors. He glanced at his
watch: 8 p.m.
His head was down as the limo pulled up in front of Macomber's house. Without missing a step, he turned in at the house just east of it, hid himself in shadows.
He could see the gleaming front grill, reflecting the streetlights, leopard spots on its shiny flanks. The license plate read:
MAC i.
The driver got out, came around in front of the grill, stooped to open the near-side passenger door. Tracy saw Delmar Davis Macomber emerge from the limo's depths. Though he had not
712
P
seen the man in almost fourteen years, he could not have missed him. The tall frame, the wide square shoulders, the straight back, the fluid motion of the hips. No, he did not even have to see the face to know it was Macomber. But he did catch a flash Of burnished cheek, a line of moustache, before the other turned to go up the front steps of his house.
Tracy saw the ornate wrought-iron gates, the spiked gas lamps burning real flame, the short square balcony emerging from just below the second storey leaded glass window. Macomber had already gone inside but he saw that a frontal approach was out of the question. There was far more illumination for one thing. For another, there was a space of perhaps ten feet just inside the gate when he would have been totally without protection.
He knew there to be only one other possibility and he searched for it now. Macomber's house was one of many built at the turn of the century. Times and customs were entirely different then. Many of the wealthy had stables behind their houses and while over the years these had been either razed or turned into a second, smaller dwelling, their narrow entrances had been kept principally because of their quaint, old-fashioned look.
Tracy found this entrance on the easterly border of the house, a brick and masonry arch perhaps three feet wide closed off by a custom-made mahogany and iron door. It was locked, of course, but that was no problem.
Penetration.
He searched for an alarm, found none. It took Tracy a little over forty seconds to snap the lock. During that time only three people passed: a couple and one old man, hands in his pockets, his head down, deep in contemplation. None of them noticed him.
He stepped quickly through, closed the narrow door behind him. He found himself in a cramped courtyard. Directly ahead was where the stables had been. A well-tended garden grew there now, filled with trees and shrubbery.
He stayed close to the side of the building, moving cautiously until he encountered the concrete edge he had been searching for; a side entrance to the basement.
713
A flight of six steep concrete stairs plunged precipitously down into the earth. The door was padlocked. He felt around the edges of the frame until he found the concealed wires. There were two of them, entwined. He knew if he cut one, the alarm would sound. If he cut the other, he would deactivate it. J-jjs father had taught him that.
He ran his fingertips along the wires until they parted company. One went up, the other straight down to what he was sure was the activating box. If he cut that one, the alarm would sound. He retraced his steps, picked up the wire that went up
He cut it.
A siren sounding from Third Avenue where Cabrini Medical Center stood. Cicadas buzz-sawed, shimmering the air with sound. Otherwise silence.
He went to work on the lock and went through the door. He closed it behind him, was about to move, when he scented something, stood stock still. His heart beat fast and his breathing came hot. He felt the electronic bug like a knuckled fist directly on his breastbone. He resisted an urge to paw beneath the buttons of his shirt, rip it from its taped resting
spot.
He used a pencil flash in the darkness confronting him, the ribbon of light seeming almost solid as it wove its way through
the blackness.
It lit up exercise material: mats, a heavy punch bag, a length of thick rope hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Free weights, wooden bars, two pieces of wooden stick.
Tracy walked over to these. He donned a surgeon's glove gift from Thwaite - rolled each over. There were no stains, though the sides were dented here and there. They had obviously been used but on Moira? Tracy thought not. Unless wax had been used, it would have been impossible to get the bloodstains off before they seeped into the porous wood.
But now that he had crossed the basement, that smell was stronger and he played the beam of light in a shallow arc, moving slowly. The narrowness of the beam made identification difficult, especially from a distance.
He saw a pile of bricks and, above them, a dark space in the
7H
^all- Shine of light like a coin. A reflection. And he moved cjoser. He moved the pinpoint beam a fraction of an inch at a jme until the entire area had been exposed to him. The stench vvas very strong now.
Tracy went down on his haunches. He slid the beam up again to the face. Who was she? The features were bloated and jjiutilated beyond their normal configuration. Whoever she had jeen, he thought, she had died horribly.
But what was she doing lying here, decomposing in Vlacomber's house? That was a question he could not begin to answer. 'Thwaite,' he whispered, 'there's a corpse in the cellar. :emale, Caucasian. In her late thirties, I'd say, though it's hard to tell. Five-seven or -eight. No idea who she is.'
Macomber and Khieu had been so careful until now. He ooked above his head. What was going on up there? He went away from the stinking corpse, moving cautiously towards the wooden staircase. He ascended, weighting each step carefully fti case the old wooden boards creaked.
He came to the top of the stairway, reached forward until his ingertips encountered the knob, he gripped it, turning it slowly. He pushed the door outward, breathing in the clearer air of the house itself. He smelled wood polish and tobacco.
The lights were off downstairs except for one lamp on a table off to his left in the entrance hall. In its partial glow, he began to take in the character of the place.
It was still. He could make out the sound of a clock ticking somewhere not far off. He stopped where he was, holding his jreath. What was that just beneath the clock's ticking? It sounded to him like chanting. A Buddhist's prayer.
Then nothing. He began to move. He could hear voices above his head, muffled and indistinct. An abrupt shout and the thunderous sound of a pistol shot, caught by the interior walls, thrown back upon itself, echoing down the narrow corridors, expanding.
Tracy sprinted for the staircase to the upper storey.
Hn Macomber walked into his house, he had the impression '"'pomething was amiss. He stood silhouetted by the street
B 715
lights in the open doorway, his keys in one hand and knew that an aspect of the house had been subtly altered.
The first thing he thought of was Tracy Richter but then the sixth sense that had served him so well in the jungles of Cambodia took full hold and he knew better.
He closed the door behind him, walked softly, slowly through his possession, searching for a break in the known and time-worn pattern. While most other people would have instinctively called out, Macomber did precisely the opposite Whatever was amiss inside his house, he wanted to pinpoint its location, identify it and neutralize it. To do that he knew he had to maintain an absolute silence. If he was not there, it could not harm him. And it did wish him harm, of that he was quite
certain.
One lamp was on in the hallway, otherwise the house seemed dark. He was about to canvass the ground floor when he passed by the staircase leading to the upper floors. He heard the Buddhist prayers, his thin lips repeating soundlessly the litany he had
heard so often.
He put one hand on the shiny banister. Halfway up, he saw that the hall light was on, its illumination slinking down the steps, brightening them one by one as he ascended.
He did not like being in the light but there was nothing he could do about it. He moved more quickly now, making only a minimum of sound. He was glad that Khieu was home where he could keep an eye on him. It meant, too, that Tracy had not yet returned from Hong Kong. Macomber had no doubt that Khieu would carry out his instructions.
He was on the landing now, about to turn towards Khieu's room, when he noticed that the door to Eliott's old room was open. It was not supposed to be open. Khieu was not in there, he knew. The chanting was coming from the other end of the
hallway.
Macomber walked swiftly down the hall, his shadow falling back behind him like a finger pointing towards the room where Khieu sat praying. He reached the doorsill, began to reach in for the knob when silence descended. The chanting had abruptly ceased.
716
p
In that instant of stillness, Macomber could sense movement in front of him. Someone or something was in Eliott's room. He squinted but the lack of light made it impossible to discern even shadows. But he felt a ripple of air, a current of movement and the short hairs at the back of his neck rose. He was moving as Eliott squeezed the trigger of the loaded pistol, his eyes tightly shut as if to block out the aftermath of the deed.
The pistol's report was deafening but Macomber had shut all sound out. He moved now purely by instinct. It was how he had survived in the jungle.
His left arm was fully extended, the fingers scraping the wallpaper for the light switch, while his right hand had snaked beneath his suit jacket for the knife he always carried with him. Burst of illumination and his target was sighted all within the space of a fraction of a second. Recognition would come later. The balance of the knife was slipping through his extended fingers, the muscles of his arm guiding its flight. A brief whistle and it dived on a line.
Eliott opened his eyes expecting to find Khieu's outstretched form sliding across the doorsill. Instead he saw his father, his face oddly blurred. He opened his mouth to shout but the blur had expanded to fill his vision. Pain and concussion rocked him simultaneously and he lost his balance, spinning around so that he faced the wall where a print of Robert DeNiro had hung until the day he had moved out. Now only a light rectangle remained, as if a void had sprung up and now he seemed to be pitching headfirst through that void. Vision faded and it seemed as if he was crying crimson tears.
He felt nothing. He was a feather, lighter than air. He floated off the floor. His heart stuttered and his thoughts, tangled and confused, slid down through the thoroughfares of his brain to mesh with that primaeval pulse. Soon, that, too, ceased to exist.
Macomber cried out wildly just as the knife left his fingertips. Recognition had followed response, stepping on its coattails and Macomber made a futile, off-balance lunge towards his target K if he thought, absurdly, that he could catch up with and deflect the flight of the thrown weapon.
717
He could do no such thing, of course, and the lunge merely brought him three steps closer to the result of his action.
'Eliott,' he whispered, confused. He saw the pistol slide from his son's limp fingers, gasped at the gout of blood the entering knife made in Eliott's face. There had been no time to think, to judge, to determine. Just a sense of danger, blossoming. Perhaps he had scented the light film of oil on the gun. That combined with the blind movement he had sensed had been more than enough. Somewhere in the pit of his mind, where the organism struggles to maintain life, he had known he was about to be shot at. He had acted in the only manner he was capable of. He had protected the organism, ceding volition and control to that instinctive part of him that did not care who was threatening it.
It did not matter that he might be dead now had he not ceded control. He only knew that he had killed his son. He was on his knees, cradling Eliott's limp form, flinging the knife away from him, across the room, hearing its metallic skitter and shuddering at the sound.
Eliott's eyes were open and he was still breathing but there was no recognition there. He saw but what it was he saw, Macomber could not say. He had seen that gaze many times in his past and he knew what it foretold. There was no hope, no time. Nothing was left of his son, his one and only beloved treasure who he had once thought to forge into his own image. Now he would have settled for life and life only. It was too large a request. And for the first time in his life, he felt totally powerless.
He was weeping and he did not know it, would not perhaps have believed it had anyone told him what he was doing. He grieved for Eliott but he thought it was an internal process only. Nothing could affect his exterior. Nothing.
He sensed movement behind him, paid no attention to it for a moment. Then he swivelled around.
'Father?' Khieu's voice was soft. He was clothed but barefoot. He moved one step into the room, two, using the edges of his soles. He made no sound. 'I heard the shot of a pistol.'
'It was Eliott,' Macomber said, still unbelieving. 'Eliott tried to shoot me!'
718
'Is that so?' Khieu's voice was like velvet. 'I'm so very sorry."
Macomber's head came up and his eyes were bleak, all the colour draining out of them. 'How can it be?" he asked. 'All the careful planning, the meticulous failsafe mechanisms built into the angka. None of it's worth a damn now. How did it happen, Khieu?'
'Karma, Father.'
'But my son -' He took a halting step forward, anguish stitched like a scar across his face. 'Khieu, you don't understand! My son tried to shoot me ... I ... I killed himl My God, can't you comprehend that?'
Khieu gazed lovingly at Macomber, his soul drinking greedily in the outpouring of raw emotion. 'As I said, Father. Karma. You have extra-ordinary karma.'
'I shit on your karmal' Macomber cried. Blood returned to his face as anger took him. 'I shit on all your goddamned Buddhist ways! What the hell are they in the face of what's happening to all of us now?'
'Peace,' Khieu said calmly.
And Macomber looked up at him, his teary eyes focusing at last. He felt the beginnings of the emanations coming from his adopted son and, as he felt the rising force of them, a cold fist clutched painfully at his heart, constricting it. His face was a sudden mask and his mind whirled with a thousand questions. 'What..." For a moment he could not go on, fear and anxiety and, above all, the power of the unknown congealing the words in his throat, choking him. 'What's going on?'
The end of all things,' Khieu said as he began to move. The light from the hallway was a brilliant vast halo, as if a visible representation of his enormous inner strength. 'You look surprised, Father. I cannot think why. I am what you have made me. Only what you have made me.' His eyes were burning with a dark liquid fire. 'You have fashioned all that you see about you -' His outspread arms like black predator's wings. 'The death °f your son ... He thought you were me, you see. I told him 'wanted to die.' ' What're you saying?'
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'Oh, the pain I see on your face, Father.' Moving still, constantly moving. 'It is real now. As real as the pain I carry inside me every day. You should die for what you've done to me and to Samnang. You betrayed him, Father, then flew in on steel wings to save me ... to pull me out, give me a new life. You killed Sam's murderers but first you killed him. Eliott told me
all of it. He-'
'Lies!' Macomber screamed. 'I don't know where he got those ideas. But they're all lies. Eliott hates me. He '
'He got those lies from these,' Khieu said, brandishing the papers and Macomber staggered back, silenced. 'Where?' he whispered. 'How?'
'But really Father, I don't wish death on you. Not you who gave me life when there was only destruction all around me. You who took me out of the hell of war and brought me ... here.' Khieu was slipping away, slipping ... 'No, it is infinitely better that you live with what you've done, so that every day, every night when you try to sleep and cannot you will remember the moment of your son's death, reliving it over and over. And when you do sleep there will be only the dreams of that moment, repeating over and over until you cannot bear it any longer and sanity begins to slip away. There is the end of your life, Father.'
Macomber was standing, wide-eyed, wondering how it was that Khieu was no longer under his control. When ... ? Then he remembered. He opened his mouth. 'It began when you went back. I know it did. You must tell me what happened to you in Cambodia. I must knowl'
'Your time of demanding is gone, Father. Along with your power. It ebbs away from you with every breath you take, with every beat of your heart.' He disappeared into the light, his black silhouette melting away as if it had never existed.
'Wait!' Macomber cried, stricken. 'Don't go!' For he knew, just as he had the first time he had seen Khieu as a teenager had seen what the boy was capable of- that nothing was possible without him, not the angka, not his dream of ultimate control, not the life he had chosen for himself. And he had chosen this. Karma.
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f The cooling corpse of his son he cradled so gently in his Ipowerful arms was proof enough that this was so. God curse liarma for all time, he thought, rocking slowly. He longed to get tup and go after Khieu but he could not. He could not yet bring himself to let go of his son, as if his presence now would be of 'some comfort to Eliott.
