Jamie sat next to Blascoe on the couch and turned on her recorder.

"I'd like to start from the beginning, Mr. Blascoe—"

"Call me Coop."

"Okay, Coop. I'm a reporter for The Light and—"

"The Light? I love The Light!"

Why am I not surprised, Jack thought.

But Jamie was all business. "Glad to hear it. Now, what I want from you is the truth, the unvarnished, warts-and-all truth about the Dormentalism situation: How you started it and how you came to your present… circumstances."

"You mean why I'm not in suspended animation, and how I came to be a shell of my former self?" He leaned closer and spoke in a conspiratorial tone. "Know what? If you hold me up to your ear you can hear the ocean roar."

"I'm sure that would be very interesting, but—"

"This'll take all night," Jack said.

She looked at him. "Just let me handle this, okay. If Coop knows what you want to know, it'll come out. But this is a once-in-a-lifetime coup for me, and I'm going to squeeze all I can from it."

"See that?" Blascoe said. "She don't care about time. I like that." He leered at her. "But what if I don't feel like talking, beautiful?"

Jack cleared his throat. "Then I toss you in the trunk of my car—it's very roomy, you'll like it there—and haul your ass out of here."

Blascoe waved his hands like someone trying to flag down an onrush-ing car.

"No, no! Don't! I'll tell you."

Wondering why the guy was so afraid of leaving, Jack gave him one of his best glares. "Better not be bullshitting us, Coop."

The old man took a slug of Cuervo and held up his dead, halfcsmoked joint.

"Anybody got a match?"

Jack took the joint from him. "Let's not get you any more bent than you already are."

"Hey, I ve been eight miles high for most of my life."

"Still…" Jack held up the J. "Let's leave this as a reward for when you come through with some answers."

Blascoe shrugged. "Oh, hell, why not. They can't do anything to me worse than what's goin' on. And it might be fun to watch the shit hit the fan."

"What is going on?" Jack said.

"Cancer for one thing." He managed a wry smile. "My fully fused xelton is supposed to be able to cure that, but he seems to be on an extended vacation."

Jamie said, "Let's go back to the sixties, Coop. That's where it all began, right?"

He sighed. "The sixties… yeah, that's when I invented Dormental-ism… the best thing in my life that turned into the worst."

16

This time Jensen made it all the way to the sidewalk before his pager chirped.

"What now?" He was afraid to hear the answer.

Hutch's voice. "We've got some activity on that place we're monitoring."

Jensen stiffened. He wanted to ask which one of the telemetries was lighting up, but not on an open circuit.

"Be right up."

This could be good, he thought as he retraced his steps across the lobby, or this could be very bad. He'd feel a whole lot better if he knew where the Grant broad was.

Up in the office, Margiotta had gone home, leaving Lewis and Hutchison to man the fort. Lewis pointed to a red blinking light on the monitor labeled PERIMETER.

"In all the time I've been here, this is the first time I've seen that go off at night."

This was looking more and more like bad news.

"What's the readout?"

Lewis squinted at the screen. "Two large heat signatures—possibly a couple of bears."

Two bears? Jensen thought. On the same night that Amurri or whatever his name was had helped Grant leave her tails in the dust?

"Could they be human?"

Lewis nodded. "I don't know much about bears, but I think they tend to scrounge around alone. So, yeah. More than likely they're human."

Shit.

Jensen gave Lewis a rough tap on the shoulder. "Up." When Lewis complied Jensen said, "You two wait outside."

He and Hutch exchanged puzzled looks but did as told. When Jensen had the room to himself he clicked his way to the AV monitors. There he entered his ID number and punched in a password. He toggled the pickups to LIVE. That turned them on and started them transmitting.

A menu popped up, offering him a choice of half a dozen views. He clicked on the great room and waited for the picture to focus.

Even though the transmission was encrypted, it hadn't made sense to keep it going twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Besides, in the standby state the pickups were immune to most bug sweeps.

He'd put up decoy cameras just so Blascoe could disable them. It let him think he was rebelling and gave him a false sense of privacy.

A wide-angle view of the great room, through the glass eye of the moose head, swam into view. When he saw the three figures seated in a rough circle, he realized his worst-case scenario had become reality.

He exited the program and kicked open the door to the next room.

"Hutch! Lewis! Get your stuff. Road trip!"

17

Cooper Blascoe leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head and started talking. He had a Howard Hughes situation going with the hair and fingernails, and smelled like a wet collie, but Jamie ignored all that.

"Well, seeing as you're here, and you found me like this, I guess I won't be blowing your minds by telling you that Dormentalism is all a sham, man. Just something I cooked up to get money, women, and drugs—not necessarily in that order."

Jamie checked to make sure she was recording. She prayed her batteries lasted. If she'd known she was going to wind up here tonight, she'd have come prepared with spares.

She turned her attention back to Blascoe. She still found it hard to believe that she was sitting with the supposedly self-suspended Father of Dormentalism. That was a coup itself, but to be recording the real story from the man who started it all…

Did it get any better than this? She couldn't imagine how.

"I wanted a rock star life, but I was a paunchy, balding thirty-year-old who couldn't play music for shit, so that was out. But it was the sixties, man, when all these nubile chicks were joining communes and that sort of shit, and I wanted in on some of that—not to be some worker drone on a commune farm or anything like that. Not me. I wanted my own.

"But I needed a hook to bring them in. I racked my brains and dropped a ton of acid hoping something would come to me—you know, pop into my head like divine inspiration—but nothing. Nada. Zilch. I was ready to give it up and go join someone else's gig when—I don't know, late in the winter of '68, maybe February, maybe March… all I remember is it was cold in Frisco when I had this dream about some guy from someplace called Hokano talking about—"

"Wait," Jack said. "It came to you in a dream?"

Blascoe shrugged. "I guess it was a dream. Sometimes, with all the drugs 1 was doing, the line got a little blurred, but I'm pretty sure this was a dream."

"Do you speak Japanese?"

He smiled. "You mean beyond konichiwa and arigato? Nope. Languages never were my strong suit. They made me take Spanish my first year at Berkeley—also my last year, if you want to know—and I flunked it miserably."

"All right then, this guy in your dream—what did he look like?"

"Like a dream guy—golden hair, golden glow, the whole deal. Like an angel maybe, but with no wings."

Jamie could tell from Jack's expression that this wasn't what he wanted to hear. It almost seemed as if he'd been expecting a certain description and this wrasn't it.

"Anyway," Blascoe said, "the dream guy was talking about my inner spirit, something he called my xelton, being split, with half of it sleeping within, half of it somewhere else.

"When I woke up I knew that was it: the calling card for my commune… like it had been handed to me. I mean, it was all there, and perfect. Finding the Real You, the Inner You sleeping in your mind—any pitch with "mind" in it was a sure grabber in those days—and achieving some sort of mystical natural harmony. Dynamite stuff. But I needed a name. I definitely wanted 'mental' in it—you know, for mind?—and then got the brainstorm of putting it together with 'dormant'—as in dormez vous, because the gals were gonna have to sleep with me to wake up their xelton."