Free Tintagel by Paul Cook

own breathing filled his ears. Everything lost interest for him. Sleep. Sleep. He floated.
    He woke. Lanier lay sprawled on the shining black floor of his workroom. A few meters away, Perry Eventide lay curled like a baby. The lights suddenly, brightly, snapped on and Christy unlocked the airtight door.
    "Fran, are you all right?"
    He shook his head, clearing his mind, trying to focus. He zipped off the air-hood. Bitter L.A. atmosphere greeted his lungs. Sweat peppered his forehead.
    "Yes, I think so." He turned to Eventide. "I got him, though. It was scary this time. Really scary."
    Eventide rolled over with a groan. Christy gasped. The two ambulance attendants, who had been waiting just outside the door, ran in around her.
    "What happened to him?" She pointed. Eventide gripped his stomach, rolling over in a pool of blood. He was very pale.
    Lanier peeled off his gloves and kneeled beside him. "Nothing," he said to her. "He was all right when I found him. It was rough, but we made it out."
    Eventide winced, raising his right hand, which was covered with blood.
    "She did this to me," he whispered. The attendants bent over him and lifted him carefully. "Oh, Jesus God," he cried. Blood bubbled at the corners of his mouth.
    "He's been knifed," the first attendant said. "Just under the left lung, very deep."
    They wheeled him out as fast as they could. The other attendant began working on the wound.
    Lanier stood in amazement. What had happened beside that drained creek ? He tried to recall.
    Christy followed the attendants out to the idling ambulance. She frowned, knowing that this was the sort of thing that required a helicopter. Not a four-wheeler and a twenty- to thirty-minute ride into civilization.
    Perry Eventide was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Luke's General Hospital in Thousand Oaks, owing, in part, to two efficient knife wounds, and another earthquake that broke two freeways strategically in half about eleven-thirty that morning. It took three hours to get Eventide to the hospital, and the ambulance driver perished from smog exposure when millions of automobiles stranded on the freeways in the Valley poured a record amount of pollutants into the air.
    That day, three hundred and twelve people died trying to breathe on a hot summer afternoon in the bowl of the San Fernando Valley. Perry Eventide was not mentioned in the Times obituary tally.

Chapter Five

    The Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1

    Ralph Vaughan Williams

    The President sat in the morning sunshine that leaned through the bulletproof glass of the Oval Office windows and whimsically considered renaming the office of the Secretary of State to Secretary of Chaos. Floyd Matkin had just been reported "vanished" at the preliminary summit conference in Bonn where the delicate negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Japan were taking place. She wasn't at all pleased with the situation.
    War had nearly broken out between the two nations, and as a major ally to both, Katie Babcock didn't want the United States to appear as if it were siding with one nation over the other. The fact that Japan had bombed a major port because the Saudis refused to export what little oil they could spare to Japan caused a great deal of concern among the President, her aides, and Congress. She was having a hard enough time trying to keep the Joint Chiefs from filling the Indian Ocean with every ship the United States owned.
    Now, Floyd Matkin, one of the best statesmen this country had ever produced, was gone.
    "Rita." Katie stabbed the intercom.
    "Yes, Katie, right here."
    "Could you bring in the latest score sheet, and tell Ken I want to see him as soon as possible."
    "Right."
    Rita brought in the list that Katie requested. The Bureau of Statistics daily computed the number of "vanished" individuals at all levels of government employ, including all the major industries. Katie always perused it closely, especially for members of Congress and their staffs.
    Floyd's name wasn't on it. Yet , she