63

Falkirk stood on the dark porch of the bungalow, simmering with hatred directed at Edwin Harkenbach, at Jeffrey Coltrane, at his own team of agents—at everyone he had ever known, really. In all his years, whom had he encountered who wasn't worthy of being despised? No one. He cherished his resentment, fondling in memory the reasons that people had earned his enmity, worrying at those recollections as if they were a chain of demonic prayer beads, until his malice festered into a virulent and implacable rancor from which he took great pleasure.

Although he was supposedly at risk of another bleeding ulcer—one had almost killed him two years earlier—Falkirk washed down three caffeine tablets with a mug of black coffee. His internist allowed him neither the pills nor the brew. Dr. J. Halsey Sigmoid, the best in Washington, DC, was the preferred physician to those in the highest corridors of power, but he was as much a nanny and a moralist as a man of medicine; he had a list of forbidden pleasures only exceeded in length by his list of arduous required lifestyle practices. To hell with him. Falkirk would stay awake for a month if that's what it took to nail Jeffrey Coltrane, retrieve the key, and secure for himself the ultimate power of that device.

When he finished the coffee, he set the mug on the porch rail and lit a cigarette. If he had witnessed this nicotine indulgence, J. Halsey Sigmoid would have launched into a schoolmarmish lecture about bad habits and addictive substances, showering Falkirk with pamphlets full of pictures of diseased lungs. After he finished the first cigarette, he lit a second.

Little more than an hour had passed since Coltrane and his daughter were almost caught in the Bonners' walk-in closet and escaped by porting out of this world to some other.

Edwin Harkenbach had known that operatives were getting close to him. Two days ago, he recognized one of Falkirk's men in Suavidad Beach and slipped away before he could be apprehended. Having become irrationally, hysterically terrified of porting, he hadn't used the key since going on the run, though it was the best way to disappear and foil his pursuers forever. The computer model of his psychology predicted he wouldn't overcome his paranoid fear of the multiverse, yet he would still have too much pride to destroy the remaining key, the last proof of his life's work, and thus would entrust it to someone. Now they knew to whom he'd given it.

Coltrane was an amateur, a fool playing with the biggest and hottest matches ever made, and he would commit a fatal mistake. He would not return home right away. He would be cautious. He might wait a day or two, a week, a month, but sooner or later he would return for one thing or another. He was a weak-minded homebody, a softhearted sentimentalist. He'd convince himself that he could visit, pack up whatever items of nostalgic value mattered to him, then safely port out again.

Men were stationed in the woods around Shadow Canyon Lane. Men were in the Bonner house until that family came back from vacation. Ultraquiet drones were flying around-the-clock surveillance over the area. And John Falkirk, with two of his best agents, would live in this bungalow until Coltrane dared return, whereupon they would shoot the sonofabitch in the head on his arrival, without asking questions or giving him the chance to port out again.

If Coltrane was stupid enough to bring the girl, Falkirk would shoot her in the head, too. It would be a pleasure. And then, before Falkirk left with the key to everything, he would put the white mouse down the garbage disposal, alive.