Dark Rivers of the Heart

Range Rover, Roy remembered Mama.
        For one frantic moment of denial, he tried to delude himself into remembering that he had switched off or unplugged the attache case computer before he had departed the chopper. No good. He could see the video display as it had been when he'd put the workstation on the deck beside his seat before he had hurried to the cockpit: the satellite look-down on the shopping center.
        "Holy shit!" he exclaimed, and every Mormon cop within hearing twitched as one.
        Roy raced to the back of the supermarket, through the stockroom, out the rear door, through the milling strike force agents and cops, to the damaged helicopter, where he could use the secure phone with its scrambling device.
        He called Las Vegas and reached Ken Hyckman in the satellite-surveillance center. "We've got trouble-" Even as Roy started to explain, Hyckman talked over him with pompous ex-anchorman solemnity:
        "We have trouble here. Earthguard's onboard computer crashed. It inexplicably went off the air. We're working on it, but we-" Roy interrupted, because he knew the woman must have used his VDT to take out Earthguard. "Ken, listen, my field computer was in that stolen chopper, and it was on-line with Mama."
        "Holy shit!" Ken Hyckman said, but in the satellite-surveillance ceilter, there were no Mormon cops to twitch.
        "Get on with Mama, have her cut off my unit and block it from ever reaccessin her. Ever" The JetRanger chattered eastward across Utah, flying as low as one hundred feet above ground level where possible, to avoid radar detection.
        Rocky remained with Ellie after Spencer went forward to oversee the crew again. She was too intensely focused on learning as much as she could about Mama's capabilities to be able to pet the pooch or even talk at him a little. His unrewarded company seemed to be a touching and welcome indication that he had come to trust and approve of her.
        She might as well have smashed the VDT and spent the time giving the dog a good scratch behind the ears, because before she was able to accomplish anything, the data on the video display vanished and was replaced by a blue field. A question flashed at her in red letters against the blue: WHO GOES THERE?
        This development was no surprise. She had expected to be cut off long before she could do any damage to Mama. The system was designed with elaborate redundancies, protections against hacker penetrations, and virus vaccines. Finding a route into Mama's deep program-management level, where major destruction could be wrought, would require not merely hours of diligent probing but days. Ellie had been fortunate to have the time necessary to take out Earthguard, for she could never have achieved such total control of the satellite without Mama's assistance.
        To attempt not merely to use Mama but to bloody her nose had been overreaching.
        Nevertheless, doomed as the effort was, Ellie had been obliged to try.
        When she had no answer for the red-letter question, the screen went blank and changed from blue to gray. It looked dead. She knew there was no point in trying to reacquire Mama.
        She unplugged the computer, put it in the aisle beside her seat, and reached for the dog. He wiggled to her, lashing his tail.
        As she bent forward to pet him, she noticed a manila envelope on the deck, half under her seat.
        After petting and scratching the pooch for a minute or two, Ellie retrieved the envelope from under the seat. It contained four photographs.
        She recognized Spencer in spite of how very young he was in the snapshots. Although the man was visible in the boy, he had lost more than youth since the days when those pictures had been taken. More than innocence.
        More than the effervescent spirit that seemed evident in the smile and body language of the child. Life also had stolen an ineffable quality from him, and the loss was no less apparent for being inexpressible.
        Ellie studied the woman's face in the two pictures that showed her with Spencer, and was convinced that they were mother and son. If appearances didn't deceive-and in this instance she sensed that they did notSpencer's mother had been gentle, kind, soft-spoken, with a girlish sense of fun.
        In a third photo, the mother was younger than in the two with Spencer, perhaps twenty, standing alone in front of a tree laden with white