Shock Warning Read Online Free PDF Page B

splotches, gradually clearing. Moving from solar apogee toward the horizon. Dusty mountains, dustier deserts. Lancaster. Or worse, Barstow. Or worst, Needles. Middle of the Mojave. The most forlorn, desolate place on God’s sometimes-green earth.
    He kept leafing. More sky, more mountains. Some people. Then more people: huge crowds. Mostly Hispanic, by the look of them. A prizefight, a cockfight, a bullfight?
    Ten pictures down so far nothing to see. It reminded him of television.
    Then something—flowers. Desert plants, two feet high, with dull green stems and brilliant hungry yellow flowers that soaked up the sun as if it belonged exclusively to them alone.
    “Marigolds,” said Jacinta.
    “So?”
    “Her flowers.” She motioned for him to keep looking.
    The next one was a little different. Fairly well-registered, it showed the desert sky, the distant mountain range, and the desert floor.
    “ Mira .” Jacinta, urging him, pointing at something. Her expectant expression was irresistible.
    Devlin took a deep breath. In New York or Washington, you never had to be alone if you didn’t want to, because there were always plenty of intimate strangers around. But in L.A., alone was the default mode; the whole town was one big party you weren’t invited to. It was the only city in America, Devlin thought, where you could be truly, blissfully all by yourself.
    If he hurried he could still catch lunch at Tom Bergin’s over on Fairfax and bang back a couple of cold Smithwicks while he pondered how he was going to kill his evening before heading back to his place in Echo Park alone. He hadn’t had anyone there since she was there, hadn’t had anyone period. Because while she might have betrayed him, he would never betray her.
    What was the first rule of a confidential op? Keep your cover story 99.9 percent true. And what was the second? Never trust anybody, never fall in love with anybody. He had broken all those rules, and now he was paying the price—in heartache and career ruination. Whether he would pay the ultimate price remained to be seen.
    Maryam . . . where are you?
    “Excuse me, señor?” asked Jacinta.
    “Nothing,” he said. “Please continue.”
    Who sent her? It might have been Seelye, trying to steer him some business since his disgrace. It might have been President Tyler, torturing him, or playing him; he used to think Tyler, running desperately for reelection now against a formidable female candidate who was leading him by double digits in the polls, was a blithering idiot, but the way he had played them all over the past two years had revealed the hand of the master.
    Or it could be Emanuel Skorzeny. For his money, Door Number 3 was always where pure evil dwelled, and at this point he saw no reason to reassess his experience.
    “ Mira ,” insisted Jacinta, shaking the Polaroid photo at him.
    What looked like a rainbow was circling the sun. A rainbow in the desert, where the temperature was at least one hundred and twenty degrees, and the humidity near zero. A place where there hadn’t been any rain since the dinosaurs.
    “You don’t believe.” A pudgy finger punched the Polaroid. “Look again. Closely.”
    And then he saw what she was talking about: a white, vertical rectangle blazing against the darkness. It might have been Kubrick’s famous black monolith from 2001 , bleached out. A reverse image, like the Shroud of Turin, unnoticed until somebody had the bright idea to take a photo of it.
    This is what she was looking at. This is what she wanted him to see.
    “The doorway. You see now.”
    One more photo to go. As he looked, he shot a last glance at the condemned mammoth, still beseeching him to do something. But sometimes you just had to embrace the suck.
    Lucky thirteen:
    At first glance, it was nothing but a big white splotch, vaguely pear-shaped. It could be anything, including what it no doubt was, a photographic irregularity. Involuntarily, he looked up at the sky, but even through the