Jungle of steel and stone.

George C. Chesbro.

for Mark and Michaele.

Chapter One.

Veil dreams.

Vivid dreaming is his gift and affliction, the lash of memory and a guide to justice, a mystery and sometimes the key to mystery, prod to violence and maker of peace, an invitation to madness and the fountainhead of his power as an artist.

Now vivid dreaming is also his pa.s.sport to the land where his love is lost.

"Come to me," Sharon whispers. "Love me, Veil. Tango with me on the edge of time."

"Yes," he replies, and begins his dream journey through no time and across no s.p.a.ce to the place beyond the Lazarus Gate, a perilous state of consciousness a sigh from death that only Veil can reach and return from safely. Sharon had gone beyond the Lazarus Gate to be with him at his time of greatest danger, and now she is trapped there.

As he approaches death he becomes pure blue flight, an electric pulse with no differentiation between body and mind. There are no fixed reference points, no sound, only the conviction that he is traveling at great speed. Then light arcs through him, flashing like lightning down his spine. He explodes and is rea.s.sembled, floating weightless, before the shimmering white radiance of the Lazarus Gate. As he unhesitatingly pa.s.ses through there is another flash of blinding light and a great, booming chime sound that he feels in his head, heart, stomach, and groin.

Sharon Solow, naked like Veil, waits for him in an infinitely long corridor bounded on both sides by walls of swirling gray where ominous, toothed shapes lurk, melting away and re-forming, sighing, beckoning. Although there is no wind here, Sharon's waist-length, wheat-colored hair billows behind her as she comes toward him, and her glacial-blue, silver-streaked eyes gleam with love and desire. Her laughter, like their voices, is a chime scale that bounces off the deadly surface of the surrounding walls and falls around them in a cascade of fluorescent sparks.

"How am I doing down there?" Sharon chimes as she touches his mind and blends her dream-body with his.

Veil laughs. "Down where?"

"Down, around, over, under, betweena"whatever. What's happening to the rest of me?"

"You're as beautiful as ever," Veil says, reacting to the anxiety in her voice, gently caressing her mind.

"Really?"

"Yes, Sharon. Obviously you're being fed intravenously, but you're breathing on your own. You're bathed every day, ma.s.saged and moved into a different position every six hours."

"Am I still at the Inst.i.tute for Human Studies?"

"No."

"Where, then?"

"You're being cared for in a CIA clinic in Langley, Virginiaa"it's the best."

"You've never mentioned that before."

"You've never asked before."

Sharon frowns. "But the CIA is your enemy." "Not the CIAa"just a man by the name of Orville Madison."

"He's the 'fat fortune-teller' you once mentioned to me, the man who wants you dead, isn't he?"

"Yes. He was my controller twenty years ago, but he's moved up in the world since then; now he's the CIA's Director of Operations."

"I don't understand. If this man hates you so much, why would he allow me to be cared for in a CIA clinic?"

Veil does not reply. He tries to draw Sharon even closer to him, but she resists, moving back slightly in the endless corridor. In the wall to Veil's left, something moans.

"Tell me, Veil."

"It's not important."

"Please tell me."

"He's the man I made the arrangements with. Madison supervises your care."

"But he wants to kill you!"

"Yes, but in his own time and in a place of his choosing. For now it gives him pleasure to have power over me."

"And he has that power over you because of me, doesn't he?"

"Sharona""

"What have you given him, Veil?"

My soul, Veil thinks. He says, "I've agreed to carry out certain special a.s.signments for him when he asksa"and if I approve of the a.s.signments."

"I'm sorry, Veil."

"For what?"

"You've delivered yourself to a man who hates you in order to save me."

Veil shrugs. "I consider it a small price to pay for the woman I love. Besides, if not for what happened at the Inst.i.tute, he might have put a bullet in my brain by now."

"But he intends to do that anyway!"

"One day, yes. But not now."

"You won't be free from him until I'm . . . well, will you?

He would never be free, Veil thinks as he glances to his right at the gray, chiming wall beyond which he had seen Sharon's flesh begin to glow and melt from her bones. His soul would belong to Orville Madison for as long as the CIA Operations Director allowed him to live.

"Madison is keeping his part of the bargain," Veil replies easily. "You're being kept in good health, and a team of specialists is constantly trying to work out ways to bring you back to consciousness."

"One day, maybe, I'll just be able to follow you back through the Lazarus Gate."

"Maybe."

"Does this Orville Madison know that you can contact me?

"No."

"Does he know anything about this thing you can do?"

"Not really."

"Not really?"

"He knows about my brain damage and vivid dreaming, but not the rest of it."

Sharon laughs. "Wouldn't he be surprised!"

"I imagine so."

"But what does he think happened to me?"

"He just thinks you're in a coma."

"But he must have seen my EEG. n.o.body in a simple coma spikes like that."

"He knows about the Lazarus Gate, but he thinks it's nothing more than a fleeting state of consciousness a very few people pa.s.s through just before death. He's right, of course."

"Except for you and me, Veil."

"Except for you and me." He could come and go at will; Sharon's mind was trapped there.

"If he ever found out that you can do this, he'd try to make you use it for him, wouldn't he?"

"Of course. Fortunately for me, Orville Madison's main interest is in controlling everybody around him and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g his enemies. He loses interest quickly in things for which he can't see a practical application to his primary goals." "Could you actually spy for him with your dreaming?"

"No. My dreams are just thata"dreams. They're projections of my own mind, not an entry into anyone else's."

"But what is this?"

"This is an exception. Yours is the only mind I can actually touch; that's because you're here and because I'm able to reach this place in dreams. I always dream vividly and often imagine myself living other lives, experiencing things with somebody else's perceptions. But those dreams are nothing more than extensions of my imaginationa"a kind of sorting-out of things I know, or believe to be true. Except for what happens here beyond the Lazarus Gate, I can never be certain that what I experience in dreams has any basis in reality."

"You can be anyone you want to be."

"I can imagine myself as anyone."

Sharon is silent for a long time. "I want to be with you, Veil," she says at last. "I want to be with you back therea" wherever 'back there' is. The other reality."

"You will be."

"I love you, Veil."

"And I love you," Veil says as he embraces Sharon, then rolls away from the dream into deep sleep.

Chapter Two.

The short, stocky black running up East Sixty-ninth Street toward Fifth Avenue was holding Victor Raskolnikov's statue under his right arm and carrying one of the art dealer's African spears in his right hand. His white shirt was stained red over the area of his left shoulder, and that arm flopped limply as he ran.

Pushing aside his thoughts of Sharon Solow, Veil Ken-dry took the wrapped painting he was carrying from under his arm and set it down against a fire hydrant. He was about to angle across the street to intercept the runner when he heard a car door open and slam shut close by. He glanced to his right in time to see a gaunt, pockmarked man in a purple T-shirt and grease-stained chinos skip around a late-model black Pontiac and start across the street. Then he saw Veil watching hima"and froze. He licked his lips as fear moved across his face like a ripple in water, then abruptly turned around and got back into his car. He turned on the engine and backed down the street in a screech of burning rubber.

Veil sprinted across the street and was loping easily ten yards behind the injured, burdened man when he suddenly realized that the black did not intend to turn at the corner. "Jesus Christ," Veil muttered as he surged forward in a renewed burst of speed. He was only a step or two behind the runner, reaching out for the man's collar, when the black, without hesitation, sped under the red traffic signal and leapt off the curb into the alley of steel death that was Fifth Avenue at 8:50 on a summer Friday evening.

Veil almost stumbled into the traffic, but he broke his momentum by grabbing the pole supporting the traffic signal. He swung out over the pavement, then just managed to pull himself in toward the sidewalk as the side of a taxi brushed against his spine and a loose sliver of chrome caught and tore his shirt. An instant later there was a deafening cacophony of blaring horns and skidding tires, and then, like a discordant echo, the screeching of locked brakes and the crashing of colliding, crumpling metal. Headlights popped, gla.s.s shattered. The din slammed against Veil's senses like a physical blow as he spun away from the pole, then watched and waited for almost two minutes before the mammoth chain collision finally ground to a halt.

Now Veil stepped out into the street, carefully picking his way across what resembled a lava flow of broken machinery, vaulting locked b.u.mpers and rolling over crumpled hoods as he searched for what he a.s.sumed must be the crushed, lifeless body of the black. But there was no body; somehow the man had made it safely across the street and into the dark green forest-gloom of Central Park.

Veil turned back and immediately went to the aid of an injured motorist in a nearby car. The woman had banged her head on the windshield and twisted her ankle, but did not appear to be seriously injured. Veil wrapped her in his light jacket, then moved on to look for others who might need help. Sirens wailed as police and ambulances converged on the scene from all directions. On Sixty-ninth, a police car's siren died with a loud whoop as two patrolmen jumped out. Veil knew both of the men; one glared at him with open hostility, while the other offered a barely perceptible smile and nod, which Veil returned.

Openly displaying a friendly att.i.tude toward Veil Ken-dry was not something a policeman in any of the five boroughs of New York City could afford to do without risk of career damage, Veil thought with vague amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Excuse me, sir."

Veil turned in the direction of the rich baritone voice and found himself looking into the dark brown eyes of an olive-complexioned, heavily muscled man dressed in a brown gabardine suit. "Yes?"

"Detective Vahanian," the man said, flashing a gold detective's shield. "What's your name, sir?"

"Veil Kendry."

The detective uttered a soft, almost imperceptible grunt of surprise. Shadows of uncertainty moved in the man's eyes, then were blinked away. "Did you see what happened here?"

"A man ran across the street against the light."

Vahanian looked out over the wreckage clogging the street and shook his head in disbelief. "How long ago?"

"Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes," Veil replied as he glanced at his watch. "If you're also investigating a theft from the Raskolnikov Gallery, he's your man. He was carrying the idol they call the Nal-toon, and a spear he must have s.n.a.t.c.hed off the wall."

"Obviously you read the papers."

"On occasion. Also, Victor Raskolnikov handles my work. I'm a painter. I know about the Nal-toon; it's been the bane of Victor's existence for the past two months. I don't think he'll ever handle another piece of primitive art.

"I wouldn't blame him. Where did this man go?"