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Prologue

HE SAW THE ainst the , ugly and flat-looking, with scores of s that didn’t look out over h Then, suddenly, he was behind thehim take the elevator to the nineteenth floor He was nearly beside hi corridor and opened the door to a large office A s he said He watched thewoman, both well dressed, both obviously subordinate to hie office with the e desk with its computer on top, the built-in bookshelves behind him, the s beside hiht behind theblack robe He watched him fasten the two clips closed Theroo cold, all the earlier humor wiped clean There was a buzz It stopped abruptly when he came into the room Then the place went deathly silent

Suddenly the rooan to spin, faces blurred into one another, the very air of the rooreat main doors burst open and three uns like Russian AK47s They were shooting, people were screa everywhere He saw the hten with horror and fury He saw thethat had separated him fro His leg was up, he was turning, striking out, his motion so fast it was hard to see it clearly Soht behind the e in him, the vicious tension and deterain, turning this time to face him He stared at himself, looked deeply into the eyes of a ain He felt the spit pool in hisa le sheet that ound tightly around hi on his lips He was soaked with sweat, his hair plastered to his head His heart was pounding so fast and hard he thought he’d explode Again, he thought, that bloody dreaain He didn’t think he could stand it

An hour later, he let hi the door behind him He was on the way to his car when a ood half dozen photo flashes It was too rapher, hauled hiht in his face, "You’ve gone over the line, you little bastard" He grabbed his camera, pulled the film out, and threw hi on his back, gaping at him

"You can’t do that!"

"I just did Get offhis caht to know!"

He wanted to beat the guy senseless The urge was so strong he was shaking with it It was then he knew he had to leave Otherwise it ht not stop before he went nuts and really hurt one of the jerks Or he simply just went nuts

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ROCKY MOUNTAINS SPRING

HE STOOD AT the edge of the ood two hundred feet before sentle wildflower-covered slopes and sharp gaping ridges He breathed in the thin air that was so fresh it burned his lungs, but, truth be told, it burned less today than it had yesterday Soon, the frigid clean air at nearly six thousand feet would become natural to him It had been only yesterday that he’d realized he hadn’t thought all day about a telephone, a TV, a radio, a faxat hi questions six inches fro explosions of white froured, at last he was beginning to let go, to forget for stretches of time what had happened

He looked across the valley at the massive,-raw mountains that stretched e, the owner of the Union 76 gas station down in Dillinger, had told him that many of the locals, lots of them Trekkies, called the whole hest peak rose to twelve thousand feet, bent slightly to the south, and looked like a misshapen phallus He wasn’t about to climb a er joked about that peak, saying it was a sight with snow dropping off it in the summer