The nervous smile, meaningless, sped across her lips again.

Vasquez seemed to take it for assent. “We’ll have to arrange a program, the object of which will be to formulate our plans down to the last detail. We’ll need to do a great deal of work. It will take time—time that must be unencumbered by distracting pressures of the kind Frank Pastor has been inflicting on you. This requires seclusion. I have in mind a place where we should be able to make things as comfortable for you as might reasonably be expected. There’ll be no companions the boy’s age but the place of which I’m thinking does have stables and horses. I understand he’s a self-sufficient child.”

“No child that age is self-sufficient.”

“He’ll have his parents with him,” Vasquez said. “He’ll miss school of course. The school terms are just now beginning.”

“I’m aware of that.” She was still cool with him. “Why can’t we stay right here? There’s a country school in the village—it’s fourteen miles.”

“We don’t want to involve your friends any more than they’re already involved, Mrs. Mathieson.”

Vasquez let that sink in. Then he said: “I don’t merely want you and the boy to be where you’re safe. I want you to be where your husband knows you’re safe and where I know you’re safe. The only way we can avoid being distracted by concern over your safety is to have you and Ronny with us at all times. I’m afraid both of you may find it tedious but I’m sure you’ll agree boredom is preferable to anxiety.”

An expression tightened the skin around her mouth: It might have been an effort to choke off anger. Abruptly she went across the porch. “I suppose I’d better get packed again.” Without further talk and without a glance at Mathieson she went inside the cabin.

Vasquez tipped forward in the rocker and got to his feet. He lifted an eyebrow in Mathieson’s direction and stepped off the porch and walked away toward the trees. Mathieson followed him past the Cadillac to the far side of the clearing where Vasquez stopped and thrust his hands into his pockets. “I wasn’t sure how soundproof those walls might be.”

“Why?”

“When I undertake a commission it’s not my habit to cavil over details. Don’t misunderstand this, but I wish you had told me you were having marital difficulties. It may make a substantial difference.”

“What makes you think—”

“I’m not an imbecile. I’ve got eyes.”

“Things are tough on Jan right now. Tougher than they are on me.”

“It’s nothing that recent.”

“Aren’t you getting a little out of line?”

Vasquez said, “Whatever program we settle on, you can be sure it will demand your full attention. If you’re going to be distracted by emotional turbulence it will undermine your efficiency. How long have you been estranged?”

“Estranged? We’ve never been separated.”

“Don’t quibble over definitions.”

“We’ve got an understanding.”

“You’re still splitting hairs. I’m not prying out of seedy curiosity, you know.”

He regarded Vasquez dismally over a stretching interval. The undulating rasp of a light plane somewhere above the mountains distracted him briefly; finally he said: “It goes back to the first time. When we had to pick up and leave New York. Things started going sour then.”

“How old was your son?”

“Four. I suppose we both kept hoping the sores would heal. I think they still can. I want us to be the Mathiesons again, at least—we had a chance to get somewhere from that point. Things were better the last few years, much better than they’d been before. Now it’s collapsed—she can’t take any more of this pressure. It isn’t her fault. She never asked for any of this.”

“She supported you in your initial resolve to testify against Pastor.”

“Yes. Maybe she didn’t realize what it would cost. I know I didn’t. They told me but I didn’t listen. Not really—not in the gut. My own parents were dead, I was an only child—I had no one terribly close. I had to give up a number of friends. With Jan it was a lot worse. Her mother, her brother and two sisters, there was a young niece she adored. She hasn’t communicated with any of them in eight years. Can you imagine what that’s done to her? Her father died three years ago—we couldn’t even go to the funeral. Bradleigh told us it was watched by one of Ezio Martin’s goons.”

“Do you blame yourself?”

“I blame Frank Pastor.”

“Good. This would have no chance of success at all if you were overburdened with self-pity.”

“Self-pity doesn’t come into it.”

Vasquez said, “Do you love your wife?”

“Of course I do.”

“You said that rather quickly.”

He drew a breath and closed his eyes. “You’re a pill. Yes, I love her. Would I have stuck it out otherwise?”

“You might. Habit, addiction, fear of loneliness, consideration for the child. I’m sure there are men who stay with their wives even though the only feeling they have for them is hatred.”

Mathieson wheeled, angry clear through; he walked away several paces. To his back Vasquez said, “In any case things are threadbare.”

“You could put it that way.” He snapped it out viciously; he turned to face Vasquez. “Haven’t you wormed enough data out of me yet for your computer? What’s the readout?”

“I have only one further question. Do you believe that solving your difficulties with Pastor will restore your marriage, or at least give you an opportunity to salvage it? Or have things gone too far for that?”

“I think we can put it back together. But you’re missing an important point. Whether my wife and I love each other or detest each other, it’s all the same—she’s stuck with me until this is finished. What else can she do? Go out on her own? Take Ronny with her? Pastor could find them. He’d find them and he’d use them to reach me. If you were thinking of forcing things to a head and putting some kind of ultimatum to us then you’d better forget it. She stays with me until this is finished.”

“I wasn’t unaware of that factor.” Vasquez tipped his head to one side. “But it wasn’t clear whether you were.”

“Then why did you bring it up?”

“You and your wife may not have a choice in the matter but I do. If she’s going to be an irritant I’ll put her and the boy in a safe place away from you until you’ve concluded your business. But if, on balance, she and the boy will render you more support and solidity than anxiety, then I’d prefer to keep you together. It’s not a vital decision, perhaps, but it could prove important. And I assure you it’s a decision best left to me. You’re not sufficiently detached to make it sensibly. And since it must be my decision, it was necessary for me to pry.”

“And what’s the decision?”

“They stay with you. We go together.”

“Where?”

“It’s a bit of a drive. Beyond Los Angeles—not too far north of the border. We’ll drive down in the morning.”

2

It was in the mountains forty miles northeast of San Diego—a stand of trees along a stream, a little valley rising on all sides toward moonscape summits.

A gravel drive carried them in from the state highway. It threaded a notch in the hills and bent its way through canyons, switchbacking over a pass between peaks that were littered with gray boulders the size of great houses. On a farther slope he could see an eerie stretch of mountainside tufted with the seedlings and charcoaled stumps of an old forest fire.

The gravel road brought them up from the boxed lower end of the valley past a large pond: It was almost a lake. It didn’t look stagnant and therefore there had to be some kind of earth-fault outlet that must carry its overflow under the surrounding mountains to the inland watershed beyond. Past the lake the driveway skirted along the long stand of cotton-woods and sycamores along the stream; a white three-rail fence ran along both sides of the drive. There were green paddocks and neatly maintained corrals, a huge brown barn, a variety of outbuildings. At the end there was a great lawn landscaped with stone-border flower beds and isolated evergreens trimmed into cones and balls. The driveway looped up through this rich greenery to the porte cochere of a big Victorian house—a graceful anachronism of gables and bay window and rambling wings.