AT NIGHT, THE CONSERVATORY WAS magically illuminated: every golden nimbus, starry twinkle, and silken scarf of faux moonlight as enchanting as the finest Hollywood wizards of stage lighting could design. After sunset, with the flip of a switch, a mere pocket jungle became this tropical Shangri-la.
Entering, pistol in a two-hand grip, Ethan didn’t call out to Fric. The blip he’d seen on the motion-sensor display in the library might not have been the boy.
He was unable to imagine how the estate grounds and then the house could have been penetrated without setting off numerous alarms. But the idea of an intruder getting into Palazzo Rospo astonished him far less than other things he’d witnessed lately.
The loose pebbles in the decomposed-granite pathways crunched under him, making a stealthy search impossible. He stepped carefully to minimize noise. The tiny, shifting bits of stone provided unstable footing.
He didn’t like the shadows, either. Shadows, shadows everywhere in layered complexity, calculated for dramatic effect, unnatural and therefore double deceiving.
Nearing the center of the jungle, Ethan heard a strange sound, [573] thhhup, and then again, thhhup, and heard greenery click-rustle-snap, but he didn’t realize that he was being shot at until the bole of a palm tree took a bullet inches in front of his face, spraying him with flecks of its green tissue.
He dropped fast and flat. He rolled off the path and crawled through ferns and pittosporum, through mimulus drenched with red-purple flowers, into sheltering gloom where he was grateful for all shadows, natural and not.
 
The jakes arrived before the ambulance, and after Hazard briefed them and told them where to send the paramedics, he went upstairs to look after Maxwell Dalton.
The withered man, more hideously emaciated on third sight than he had appeared to be on first and second, rolled his sunken eyes and grimaced, greatly agitated, struggling to cough up barbed words from his no doubt cracked and bleeding throat.
“Easy, easy now,” Hazard said. “Calm down. Everything’s going to be all right now. You’re safe now, Professor.”
The hooked edges of the words pained Dalton as he spat them out, but he insisted on saying, “He’s ... coming ... back.”
“Good,” Hazard said, grateful to hear the ambulance siren rising in the night beyond the broken window. “We know just what to do with the sick son of a bitch when he shows up.”
Greatly distressed, Dalton managed to roll his head side to side and produce an anguished mewling.
Thinking Dalton might be worried about his wife and daughter, Hazard revealed that he had just sent a pair of uniformed officers to their house not only to inform Rachel that her husband had been found alive but also to give her and Emily protection until Laputa could be located and arrested.
In a hiss-and-hack voice, Dalton said, “Coming back with,” and winced in pain as his throat seized up.
[574] “Don’t stress yourself,” Hazard advised. “You’re pretty fragile right now.”
At the end of the block, the shrieking ambulance turned the corner. The rainy night licked away and swallowed the last shrill note of the siren as the brakes barked on the blacktop in front of the house.
“Bringing back ... a boy,” Dalton said.
“A boy?” Hazard asked. “You mean Laputa?”
Dalton managed a nod.
“He told you?”
Another nod.
“Said he was bringing a boy back here tonight?”
“Yes.”
As he heard the paramedics thundering up the steps, Hazard leaned closer to the withered man and said, “What boy?”
 
Crouching among mimulus and Mauna Loa spaths and ferns, Ethan heard a second burst of fire, three or four shots, from a weapon fitted with a sound suppressor, and after half a minute of silence, a third burst.
None of these rounds seemed to come near him. The gunman must have lost track of him. Or maybe the guy had never known where Ethan was, had fired blindly through the jungle, and had come close with the first spray of bullets solely by chance.
Gunman—singular. Guy—one.
Common sense argued that an assault against this estate required teamwork, that one man couldn’t jump the wall, deceive the electronic security measures, disable the guards, and breach the house. That was Bruce Willis on the big screen. That was Tom Cruise in makeup. That was Channing Manheim playing a role from the dark side. That wasn’t anyone real.
If a coordinated team of kidnappers had gotten inside Palazzo Rospo, however, there would be more than one gunman squeezing off [575] short bursts of suppressing fire. They would have chopped at Ethan with one, two, three fully automatic carbines. Uzis or worse. By now he would be down, dead, and dancing in paradise.
When silence persisted after the third brief volley, he rose from cover and eased warily through the ferns, between the palms, to the edge of the pathway.
In any jungle movie, stillness like this always signaled the wilderness-savvy characters that villainy in one form or another had stepped into the natural world, silencing cricket and crocodile alike.
Green-juice smell of crushed vegetation rising from underfoot.
Muffled voice of a heating-system fan purring in the walls.
A gnat, a midge, hovering in the air before him, hovering.
Taste of blood in his mouth, the discovery that he’d pinched tongue with teeth when he dropped to the ground, the throb just now arising in the bite.
A flutter of foliage spun him around, and he brought the pistol toward the sound.
Not foliage. Wings. Through the jungle, high above the pathway, flew a flock of brightly colored parrots, blue and red and yellow and the iridescent green of certain strange sunsets.
No birds made their home in the conservatory. Neither a flock of parrots nor a single sparrow.
Plummeting in front of Ethan but then swooping high again, the colorful birds passed without one screech or squawk, and became white doves on the rise.
This was the phantom in the steam-clouded mirror. This was the impossible set of bells in his hand outside the flower shop. This was the heavy fragrance of Broadway roses in his study when no roses had been there, the precious voice of his lost wife speaking of ladybugs in the white room. This was the hand of some supernatural force held out to him and eager to lead.
After spiraling high in a frenzied flapping, down again came the swarming doves, feathering the air, toward him, past him, with a [576] thrum that both exhilarated and frightened him, that plucked notes of wonder from his heart but also struck hard the jungle-drum terror of the primitive within.
They flew. He ran. They led. He followed.
 
“Wait,” Hazard told the paramedics as they came quickly to the bed in spite of the vile stink, as they stood wide-eyed and gaping in spite of all the horrors that they had seen day after day in the conduct of their vital work.
“Boy,” Dalton croaked.
“What boy?” Hazard asked, having taken the withered man’s hand once more, holding it in both of his.
“Ten, “said Dalton.
“Ten boys?”
“Ten ... years.”
“A ten-year-old boy,” Hazard said, failing to understand why Dalton thought Laputa meant to return here with a boy, not sure that he was correctly interpreting what the wracked man meant to tell him.
Dalton strained to speak in spite of throat pain that threatened to convulse him: “Said ... famous.”
“Famous?”
“Said ... famous boy.”
And Hazard knew.
 
In the elevator, Moloch dropped Fric, and Fric tumbled in a loose heap on the floor, not sure what had happened to him. No mere pepper in that pepper spray. He could see but could not turn his eyes with the usual quickness, could blink but only slowly. He was able to move his arms and legs, but as though straining against the pressure [577] of deep water, like a weary swimmer being pulled down by a relentless undertow. He couldn’t strike a blow in self-defense, couldn’t even fully close his hand into a fist.
As t............