“I couldn’t help noticing that you and he seem, ah, close,” Monks said.

She shrugged. “He’s a maquis. I’m a bride.”

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“Ask Freeboot, okay?” she said, sounding edgy again. It seemed that this was sensitive turf. She put the sandwich on a plate and pushed it toward him. “There’s chips, and wine if you want it.”

“Thanks,” Monks said, moving a little closer to her as he picked up the plate. He was trying to zero in on the unhappiness he sensed in her-trying to gauge whether he could coax her into helping him. He decided to probe another sore spot that he had sensed.

“Motherlode told me she owned this place,” he said. “Is that true?”

“She inherited it.”

“Really?”

“Along with a trust fund the size of California. Her grandfather was a big logging guy.” Marguerite took a bowl from a cupboard and started pouring the warm broth into it.

“So she’s kind of the princess, and you’re the help?”

Marguerite didn’t answer, and her hair hid his view of her face. But her hands stopped moving.

“What does being a bride mean?” Monks said. “You sleep with anybody Freeboot tells you to? While he breaks in new brides?”

She left the room quickly, not speaking, clutching the bowl of soup in both hands.

Monks ate in front of the fireplace again, leaving her alone to feed Mandrake.

A few minutes later she came out of the bedroom and walked to the main door, still without looking at Monks. But when she reached it, she turned to him. Her eyes seemed defiant and perhaps fearful.

“I’m here because I want to be,” she said. “We all are.”

“Not Mandrake,” Monks said.

She hurried outside, slamming the door behind her.

And not me, he thought.

Freeboot waited beside the bonfire in the forest, silent, listening, attuned to the night. Occasionally, he dipped his knife blade into the canister of meth and inhaled it.

Twenty-four hours from now, Mr. and Mrs. Robert J. Emlinger of Atherton, California, would join the list of assassination targets that were baffling police around the country.

The only question was, which one of the men out stalking each other in the forest right now was going to earn the privilege of putting them on that list.

The answer came when a hulking figure lunged out of the tree line, running toward the fire like a charging bull. It was Hammerhead, the first man back-panting, face ruddy and shining with sweat, eyes glittering with crazed elation. His knife was clenched in his right fist. He thrust his left fist forward for Freeboot to see.

It held a thick swatch of Captain America ’s wavy blond hair.

Freeboot smiled.

He stepped to a niche in the rocky cliff and took out a silver goblet. It was filled with a special cocktail that he had invented: red wine saturated with finely powdered hashish and laced with XTC.

He walked back to the fire and handed the goblet to Hammerhead.

“Take this, brother, may it serve you well,” Freeboot said.

“You are no longer an ordinary human being, you understand that?” Freeboot hissed into Hammerhead’s ear. “The rules don’t apply to you no more. The human deer will cower before you. You will walk among them and be their master, yet none will know you. You are the best of the best, the top of the elite. You are on the edge of immortality.”

They strode along the dark foggy path toward the camp, Freeboot gripping the young man by the back of his belt to steer him. Hammerhead was lurching, his head weaving, wild-eyed, from side to side at the rush of perceptions flooding through his brain. Freeboot had been walking him around in the forest for half an hour, giving the drugs time to take hold, gauging his level of response. By now, Hammerhead was in a world that was hallucinatory, dreamlike, intensely heightened. His mind was wide open and defenseless. Freeboot was high, too, just enough to tune in to that but still stay firmly in control.

“You got one final task to complete,” Freeboot said. “You do it right, you make maquis. Now let me show you the reward I give to them I trust. It’s called ‘the way of heaven.’”

They reached the bathhouse that Freeboot called the Garden. He led Hammerhead around to the back, to a locked door that only he had the key to. It opened into a dark room. Hammerhead stumbled inside, groping blindly. Freeboot closed the door behind them, then stepped up to a wooden panel in a wall and slid it open. A small window of soft light appeared. Warm air drifted in through the opening, with the fragrance of incense and marijuana.

Freeboot pulled Hammerhead close.

The room they looked into shimmered with haze from the thermal water flowing through. It was rich with plants and flowers, antique furniture, statues and tapestries. Bottles of wine and liquor on a burnished copper bar seemed to glow with their own light.

But the centerpiece was Marguerite, rising from the big stone bath when the panel opened, as Freeboot had instructed her to. She was full-bodied, firmly muscled, with generous breast and hips. Her long black hair streamed wet down her back. Her taut olive skin was beaded with moisture.

She acted unaware of the watching men. Moving without hurry, she sat on the bathtub’s rim and sensuously started rubbing a fine sheen of oil onto her breasts.

Hammerhead’s staring eyes looked like golf balls-Freeboot could feel his mind, sense his astonishment at what he was seeing. The precious goal, so long the object of desire, was almost within reach.

“She’s going to be yours any time you want her,” Freeboot whispered to him. “She’ll do whatever you tell her, she’s got to. And not just her. Any bride you want, anything you want. You see? That’s the way of heaven.”

Freeboot reached over to a shelf and took down another prepared goblet. Hammerhead drained it, not leaving the window. He was still staring at Marguerite when his knees buckled. He landed on them heavily, then crashed to the floor.

This time, the red wine was spiked with GHB. It would knock him out for twenty or thirty minutes. Then he would regain a dreamlike consciousness, but not be able to move.

Next stop on the journey was a way that heaven was not.

Half an hour later, Freeboot sat in the underground command bunker, drinking mescal and watching a monitor from a hidden infrared camera that was focused on Hammerhead’s face. Hammerhead was in another of the camp’s old mine shafts, stripped naked and sprawled back against a rocky wall seeping with cold damp. The blackness in there was absolute.

His eyelids started to flicker. After a couple of minutes, they stayed open. He would be aware of his surroundings now-conscious of the cold, the dark, the sharp rocks biting into his flesh-but too leaden to do anything more than twitch.

Freeboot helped himself to another sharp hit of speed. He wanted to give Hammerhead’s discomfort time to solidify into fear-the nightmare of being paralyzed in a dungeon-while the luscious vision of Marguerite, impossibly far away now, tortured his memory.

When Freeboot was good and ready, he started into the dark tunnel, moving as silently as a creature of the night. The meth surged in his brain, adding its power to the LSD and mescal. He carried an arm-long brand of pitchy pine, its knotty end soaked in gasoline. He advanced until he could hear Hammerhead’s rough breathing. Then he clicked his cigarette lighter. The torch burst into flame, lighting the cavern’s walls with a sinister flickering glow.

Hammerhead’s wide eyes stared helplessly at the advancing fire.

“I can give you heaven,” Freeboot called out in a harsh, echoing voice. “But I can destroy you, too. Have a taste of hell, brother! You can’t move, but you can feel, ohhh, yes.”