Your Heart Belongs to Me

system—most likely from somewhere inside the house—busily deleting her image from video as soon as she passed out of frame.
    She could no longer be considered a psycho loner. The conspiracy theory, previously a sieve, suddenly held water.
    More important, the capabilities of those aligned against Ryan were impressive, and suggested depth of support.
    Finally he possessed evidence. Without witnesses to the attack, he was unable to prove that the cut in his side hadn’t happened in an accident. But cloned images on a security recording couldn’t be accidental.
    This was not much evidence by police standards. But he had no intention of turning to the police until he knew the motives of the conspirators—and perhaps not even then.
    The woman with the switchblade claimed to want him dead, and he believed that her intention was indeed eventually to kill him. Her motive, however, remained a mystery.
    The Wilson Mott operative, Cathy Sienna, had listed five roots of violence: lust, envy, anger, avarice, vengeance. She had referred to them as failings rather than motives, but they were motives all right. As with anyone intent on murder, more than one might apply.
    As Ryan was about to switch off the monitor, the image on the screen flickered and changed. Instead of a view from any security camera inside or outside the house, there appeared a glistening, viscous mass, red and marbled and blue-veined and throbbing, like a menace discovered inside a cracked-open meteor in an old science-fiction movie.
    For an instant Ryan had no idea what the thing might be, and then he realized this was video of a beating human heart and its attendant structures, inside an open human chest.
    Although he did not touch the remote control, the screen divided into quadrants representing cameras at different locations around the estate—presenting the same gruesome video. A moment later, four other camera views flashed on the screen, all featuring the throbbing heart, and then four more, and four more….
    This was not a real-time event, not a mutilation occurring on the estate, but instead an educational film of open-heart surgery. The surgeon’s hands entered the shot, and the camera pulled back to show the surgical team.
    The security system cycled through all the cameras, and then again, faster and still faster, until the images passed in such a frenzy that the action in the documentary could not be followed. The monitor went dark.
    From the racked array of magnetic-disk recorders in the cabinet arose the distress cries of electronics in death throes. Then silence—and on every piece of equipment, the indicator lights went dark.
    Ryan didn’t need to call in tech support to know that the system had crashed, that the standard thirty days of preserved recordings had been wiped, and that he no longer possessed evidence of security-video tampering.
     

 
    FORTY-TWO

    I n the master retreat, Ryan pulled open a desk drawer, fingered through folders in a hanging file, and located the one containing the photo of Teresa Reach, which he had removed from the album in Spencer Barghest’s study.
    Prior to the diagnosis of cardiomyopathy that he had received from Dr. Gupta almost sixteen months earlier, he had been convinced that in this photograph he would discover a clue that would lead him to an explanation of the strange events occurring at that time.
    Ultimately his obsessive analysis of the photo revealed nothing useful. Eventually he decided there had been no conspiracy against him, no poisoning, only innocent coincidences that seemed mysterious and meaningful because of his suspicious nature and because ill health affected his clarity of mind.
    Perhaps the time had come to look at Teresa again.
    He no longer had the workstation that Mott had provided for the enhancement and analysis of the photograph. His unassisted eyes would have to be enough.
    As he sat at the desk, the phone rang: his most private line. Caller ID provided no identity.
    When he picked up the handset, the woman with the lilies said, “Review the activity in your checking account. You’ll discover you made a hundred-thousand-dollar wire transfer as a donation for cardiovascular research. I imagine a financial loss is to you more painful than a knife wound.”
    Instead of playing her game, he said, “Who are you people?”
    “There are not people. There is me.”
    “Liar. You have institutional capabilities. Big backup.”
    “Whoever I am, you’re dead.”
    “Not