That task accomplished, she stood with her back to the shelves, watching the glittering mist of particles turn lazily through the air and staring at the door, which sooner than later someone would open, probably a humongous thug dressed all in black and wearing a gas mask.

Realizing that it took more energy—therefore more air—to stand rather than sit, Amity settled to the pantry floor. She held the saturated cloth with both hands again, over her mouth and nose. She worried about Daddy, about her mother, about Duke and Ed, about her grandparents, about Snowball in his cage and maybe scared by the strange men in the bungalow, and she wondered if this pantry was one of the many places in which she would die.

82

When they transitioned from the kitchen in Prime to the same house elsewhere, the furniture wasn’t configured precisely the same. Jeffy landed not on the chair in which he had been sitting, but beside it, dropping to the floor hard enough to bruise his tailbone.

Apparently, Ed had been sufficiently quick-witted to avoid drawing even one breath when that other kitchen had been flooded with gas. He pulled Jeffy to his feet, shoved him toward the sink, turned on the cold water, and said insistently, “Splash your face. Come on, come on. Take deep breaths, blow them out hard. Splash your face. Keep at it, man, we need your mind clear.”

Jeffy’s mind cleared faster than he thought possible, which meant that he hadn’t twice breathed in the gas, and maybe his first inhalation hadn’t been deep. Ed had ported him out of there just in time. He dried his face on a dish towel that the physicist handed him. His vision was no longer blurry. He surveyed the kitchen, which was similar to—but not identical to—the one in which the attack against them had been made.

“Where are we?”

“This is Duke’s house, but in the world where Michelle lives alone in your bungalow, where you and Amity were run down and killed by a drunk.”

“Where’s Duke?”

“If he lives here in this timeline, he’s obviously not at home, or he’d be in our face, maybe leveling a gun at us, since he’s never met me in this world and probably doesn’t know you.”

Jeffy pointed to a wall calendar that featured photographs of dogs. “I’m pretty sure he lives here.”

“I think you’re right.”

Like schooling fish, nausea suddenly swirled around and around in the bowl of Jeffy’s stomach, a lingering effect of the gas. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Then do it,” Ed said impatiently. “The clock is ticking, we’ve got work to do.”

Jeffy turned to the sink and bent forward, but the nausea passed. “I’m all right. What work?”

Drawing back one panel of his sport coat, Ed revealed the pistol in his holster. “You weren’t wearing yours when we ported.”

“I put it on the counter, by the bread box, when Amity and I were making breakfast. I never had a holster for it.”

“If Duke lives here in this world, he’ll have guns somewhere. We need to find them.”

“We’re going back there shooting?” Jeffy asked.

“If that’s what seems necessary when we get there.”

“But Amity, Michelle—”

“We’ll do our best not to shoot them,” Ed said, and he led Jeffy out of the kitchen.

In the downstairs hallway, the dark eye of a ceiling-mounted motion detector, part of the home-security system, winked red when they stepped into view. At once the alarm sounded and a stern, recorded voice declared, “You have entered a protected area. Leave at once. The police have been called.”

83

Powerful directional microphones were aimed at the windows of the Pellafino house from within a surveillance vehicle disguised as a Roto-Rooter van parked across the street and also from an abandoned house on a parallel street with a line of sight on the back of the residence. With the aid of the mics, those who were about to attack the place had determined there were five people present at that address. One of them was a version of Edwin Harkenbach—almost certainly the one who shot Falkirk at the Coltrane bungalow.

In his heightened state of consciousness, wounded but without pain, above all pain, having earlier murdered a demigod without consequences, John Falkirk sat in the back of the Roto-Rooter van, thrilled by the realization that two keys to everything were in the house—Harkenbach’s and the one that Coltrane had received from another Harkenbach. They were soon to be in Falkirk’s possession, the instruments of absolute power.

When the directional mics further determined that all five people were gathered in the kitchen for breakfast, Lucas Blackridge, the SWAT specialist, approached the residence from a direction that ensured no one could see him through a kitchen window. Employing a police lock-release gun, he opened the side door of the garage. The forced-air furnace was located there. Blackridge extinguished the automatic pilot light, to ensure there would be no explosion. He set the timer and inserted the pressurized tank of sedative into the furnace, from which the gas would be distributed through the house ducting to every room.

Falkirk was disappointed that a deadly nerve agent or poisonous gas was not available for immediate use. To obtain either, he would have incurred a wait of between twelve and twenty-four hours while his requisition was sent to Central Ordnance, considered, fulfilled, and delivered to him. For all of its secret power and ruthlessness, the shadow state nevertheless had a bureaucracy of its own and the usual lazy functionaries who felt secure in their positions because the leaders of their union were harder cases than any agents with licenses to kill.

Within five minutes of Blackridge’s stealthy entrance to the garage, Falkirk could be certain that the occupants of Pellafino’s house were knocked out and waiting to be harvested like fish that had been jacklighted and then blown to the surface with a stick of dynamite by an impatient fisherman. They would remain unconscious for about an hour or more.

At that point, agents swarmed the street in black Suburbans, barricaded both ends of the block, and quickly cordoned off the target residence. When curious neighbors stepped outside to learn the reason for the commotion, they were told to stay in their homes and were respectfully escorted inside if they were polite. However, if they objected to any extent whatsoever or were rude or had the temerity to say, “I pay your salary through my taxes,” then they were taught a lesson about obedience to authority that they would not soon forget.

Only a few years earlier, after such a blitzkrieg as this, it would have been necessary for Falkirk and his men to enter the house wearing gas masks and open the windows to ventilate the place. In so doing, they would have risked being photographed by neighbors who would have uploaded their snapshots to the internet, making it more difficult to craft a cover story that even a gullible media and a somnolent public would accept at face value.

If progress had once been the friend of average men and women, these days every advance in technology seemed to give an advantage to those who understood that the masses must be managed, controlled, and encouraged to live in a crafted virtual reality where they would be content and confident of their freedom, even though they had none. Now, Falkirk and team benefited from a technological breakthrough that spared them from the need to mask up and enter the house and throw open the windows as if engaged in spring-cleaning.

In the garage, after retrieving the first now-empty tank, Lucas Blackridge inserted a second pressurized container into the furnace. This subsequent round released a high-velocity counterpoising gas that, in chemical reaction with the initial sedative, eliminated every trace of that material and of itself, leaving zero residue of either, returning the air within the home to a normal condition.

Falkirk climbed out of the back of the van. Preceded by two of his men, he caned across the street to the Pellafino residence.

A high-pressure system of dry northern air graced the morning with a meteorological phenomenon known as “severe clear,” a totally cloudless sky of an intense blue. The day was warm but not hot, and the air appeared free of all pollution. Hawks swooped wild and high, and other birds sang in the trees.

It was the perfect day to become the emperor of everything and to kill those who conspired against his ascendancy to the throne.

84