by Dean Koontz
“Any drowned rat looked half as good as you, I’d marry it.”
“Thanks. I think.”
“I’m taking a roundabout route just to be sure it’s safe.”
“I figured that’s what you were doing.”
“Plus I want to keep this going a little while.”
“Been too long since a suitcase nuke, huh?”
“Seems forever. Those were some bad dudes back there.”
“Yes, I’m aware.”
“You sure you can handle them yourself?”
“Are you volunteering?”
“No way. They’d squash me like a bug. Just saying.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“It’d make me sick to think you wouldn’t.” He stopped beside her Ford Escape. “No goons in sight.”
“You’re a sweet man, Ethan Hunt. Thank you.”
“Guess there’s no way this could ever lead to a date.”
“Trust me, Ethan, I’d be the date from Hell.”
She got out into the rain, and as she closed the door, she heard him say, “But you wouldn’t be boring.”
21
* * *
THOSE WHO SEEMED to understand what lay behind the increase in suicides, who might even have engineered it, were clearly connected root and branch with as-yet-unidentified government agencies. Jane could only assume they would also have influence with authorities at the state level, including the California Highway Patrol.
Leaving the city, she avoided freeways because that was where the CHP patrols could be found in the greatest numbers. There were chokepoints at which traffic could be easily halted or slowed for close inspection. The drones had transmitted video of her, and the men from whom she’d escaped in the foot chase had seen that her long blond hair was now shorter and brown. A new description of her would already be in the hands of the searchers.
She had meant to head up-coast only a few miles to La Jolla, to see a man that evening and put a question to him that, depending on his answer, might decide her future. Instead, she followed a series of rain-sluiced surface streets toward the coast, circled the town of La Jolla, and found her way to Torrey Pines State Reserve.
There she connected with County Highway S12. This coastal route served a number of picturesque beach cities from Del Mar and Solano Beach north to Oceanside.
At Torrey Pines State Beach, she drove into the parking lot, which was deserted in this weather. From under the passenger seat, she fished a small tool kit and took from it a screwdriver.
She got out into the storm. The tall pines soughed. The driven rain danced on the pavement, raising from it a hissing like the threats of a thousand angry serpents.
Her wet fingers slipped on the screwdriver, but she managed to remove the front and rear license plates, all unobserved, as far as she could tell.
If there had been traffic cameras near where she had left the car before walking to the library, as there were nearly everywhere in metropolitan areas these days, agents would soon be reviewing time-stamped video from all the streets that radiated away from the park where she had nearly been apprehended. Even with clarity diminished by the rain, they would hope to find video of her leaving the car and returning to it. She had to assume both that they knew she was driving a black Ford Escape and that it had Canadian plates.
In California, a car without license plates didn’t often excite police interest, because dealerships didn’t provide temporary plates for new purchases. Better that she proceed without tags than go cruising with a pair that might be on every cop’s hot sheet within an hour or two.
She put the plates under the driver’s seat, got behind the wheel, and started the engine. Sopping wet again, she clicked the heater up a few degrees and accelerated the blower.
When the wipers swept the blearing rain from the windshield, she saw the nearby Pacific, storm-lashed and misted, rolling toward shore less like water than like a sea of gray smoke pouring off the fires of some vast nuclear holocaust.
22
* * *
AFTER STOPPING in Cardiff-by-the-Sea to refuel, she left the coastal highway for Interstate 5. She was more than twenty miles from the San Diego city limits, and the superhighway was worth the risk for the greater speed that it allowed.
She drove out of the storm just north of Oceanside, where the coastal plain was flat and scrub-covered and forbidding in the hard clear end-of-winter light.
During the drive, with time to think, she decided that her first mistake had been to answer Gwyn Lambert’s question, Where will you go from here? She’d said she had someone to see near San Diego.
The bond between Jane and Gwyn had deserved her trust. Marine wives. Marine widows. The three-strand bond of service, duty, and grief. She’d liked the woman. She’d had no reason to suspect that Gwyn was somehow compromised and on an emotional precipice.
Who had Gwyn spoken to on the phone before killing herself? Why had she spoken to anyone? To tell him that Jane was headed next to San Diego? If they—the octopuslike They—had no agent near enough to apprehend her in Alpine, knowing her next destination narrowed their search parameters.
But “near San Diego” encompassed perhaps a hundred square miles and as many as a million and a half people. Maybe that narrowed the search, but it certainly didn’t pinpoint her whereabouts.
In recent weeks, her pursuers had to have figured out that she was using library computers to do her Internet searches. There were numerous libraries in the greater San Diego area, however, including many in colleges and universities. They might anticipate that she’d want to know more about the What If Conference and the Gernsback Institute, after learning about them from Gwyn. But to find her, they would have been required to mount a watch on those websites, with the capability of identifying in real time every query from a San Diego–area library; they would then have needed to be able to immediately track-to-source the query and identify the unique signature of the workstation.
If the searchers were closing in on her even as she concluded her task in the branch library and as she gave forty dollars to the homeless veteran, her second mistake had been to dally in the park next door and make a phone call to Sidney Root in Chicago. If they knew every one of the twenty-two individuals from whom she’d gathered evidence to date, they might expect her to contact one or more of them again. Monitoring real-time phone traffic for that many people, on multiple telecom platforms, would be an enormous task, one that she wasn’t even sure current technology allowed.
Supposing all of that was possible, they would also have to trace her call, raveling backward through the microwave maze of millions of current calls to the particular transmissions from the disposable phone, and then somehow use that signal in a GPS search to locate her in the park.
All within minutes.
With only a few hours’ notice from the time Gwyn had called them, they would have needed to place teams of agents at strategic points throughout the city, so if Jane’s position was determined, at least one team had a chance of reaching her within minutes.
Maybe they had been lucky. But in any case, lucky or not, the entity on her trail suddenly seemed ubiquitous, of greater power and reach than any one law-enforcement organization, more efficient than any of the government agencies with which she was familiar, all but omnipresent and omniscient.
Even if they had identified her vehicle, she would hope to use it for a while yet. Her financial resources were not unlimited, and this was her second set of wheels since this odyssey had begun.
At San Juan Capistrano, she left Interstate 5 for State Highway 74. As the Escape climbed the rugged chaparral-cloaked hills of the Cleveland National Forest, Jane’s mood darkened faster than did the slowly waning day. Greener in this season than it would be later in the year, the borderline-desert landscape was prized by hikers and nature enthusiasts, thought beautiful by some. To her it appeared inhospitable, even bleak, as if beyond the windows of the Ford lay a stricken planet struggling under a dying sun.
/>
Descending then to Lake Elsinore and beyond. A rural world that seemed isolate. Lush meadows and valley scrub. Private graveled-and-oiled lanes leading to properties tucked back from the state route. Small and separate groves of cottonwoods and conifers testifying to an aquifer under land that would have been otherwise hardscrabble.
The remoteness was an illusion, because the hive of Southern California remained quickly accessible to the west, and even in this less bustling inland empire, “small” towns like Perris and Hemet boasted seventy or eighty thousand residents each.
She came to a private lane flanked by live oaks, turned right, and stopped at a plank gate painted white and infilled with wire. She put down her window and reached to the call box. She didn’t need to announce herself. She had a personal five-digit code that she entered on the keypad, and the gate swung open.
Beyond lay, for her, the most important place in the world.
23
* * *
THE WHITE CLAPBOARD HOUSE was a modest residence but for the luxury of a deep veranda that encircled it entirely.
Duke and Queenie were lying on that porch, among the wicker chairs, and they sprang to their feet as the Ford reached the end of the long driveway. Two German shepherds, superb specimens with deep chests and well-sprung ribs and straight backs, they were both family pets and also guard dogs that had been well trained.
Jane pulled to a stop behind Gavin’s prized apple-green ’48 Ford pickup that he had chopped and channeled and sectioned himself, adding ’37 La Salle fenders and a highly customized La Salle nose section with stainless-steel grillwork, making it a street rod of singular style.
The dogs knew her because she had left her driver’s window down to ensure they caught her scent even before she got out of the Ford.
They padded down the porch steps and sprinted to her, tails lashing the air in delight. Had she been a stranger, their approach would have been far different, circling and wary and full of menace.
Dropping to one knee, she gave each dog its share of affection. They lavished their tongues on her hands, a friendly greeting that might have repelled some people but that she received happily. They were guardians of her treasure, and she slept better knowing they were here.
As much as she loved the dogs and admired the discipline that Gavin had instilled in them, she had not come here primarily to see them. After a minute, she rose to her feet and moved toward the house, the shepherds gamboling at her sides.
With the fluid springy step of a double amputee whose knee-down prosthetics ended in bladelike feet that allowed her to be a tough competitor in a 10K run, Jessica came through the front door and onto the veranda. Jet-black hair. Cherokee complexion. Blessed with beauty that came from the headwaters of her gene pool, she was as always a striking figure.
She’d lost her legs nine years earlier, when she’d been twenty-three, serving in Afghanistan. She’d been an Army noncombatant, but roadside IEDs didn’t distinguish between armed troops and support services. Although she’d lost limbs in that godforsaken country, she found Gavin there—a combatant who had seen much hot action but had come through untouched. They had been married for eight years.
Jane bounded up the steps before Jess could spring down them, and they hugged fiercely there on the veranda as around them the dogs whidded this way and that, whacking the wicker chairs with their tails, whimpering with pleasure at this unexpected reunion.
“Why didn’t you call?” Jess asked.
“Tell you later.”
She had three spare disposable phones, all activated. Each had been purchased from a different retailer, in three widely separated towns. She had not yet used any of them, there was no way her pursuers could have a trace on them, but events in San Diego had so spooked her that she didn’t want to risk calling this special place, this haven in a world that was otherwise increasingly a jungle of hazard and chaos.
“You look good,” Jess said.
“You lie like a rug, girlfriend.”
“He talks about you all the time.”
“I think about him all the time.”
“God, it’s good to see you.”
The boy stepped through the front door. His blue eyes shone with excitement, but he was shy, standing there in the shade of the veranda, at the moment indifferent to the dogs with which he usually frolicked. She had seen him only once before in the past two months, and on that occasion—as seemed to be the case now—he had been half afraid to speak or to hurry to her, fearful that she might evaporate as she did in his dreams.
Only five, Travis was already the image of his father. Nick’s tousled hair. Nick’s fine nose, strong chin. The intensity of his presence and the aura of intelligence that, at least to his mother, radiated from his eyes were uncannily reminiscent of Nick.
He whispered, “It’s really you.”
Jane dropped to her knees, not merely to be at his level, but also because her legs suddenly grew weak and failed her. He came into her arms, and she held him as if someone might at any moment try to tear him from her. She couldn’t stop touching him, kissing his face. The smell of his hair was intoxicating, the softness of his sweet young skin.
When she had begun her search for the truth, she never imagined that she would find herself in conflict with people so powerful and merciless that the first threat they leveled at her would be to kill her only child, the only one she might ever have, this boy who was the living testament to the extraordinary love that she’d known with his special father.
She knew of nowhere else where she might have hidden him with as much hope and peace of mind as she had felt when she’d brought him here. Jessica and Gavin had been strangers to him two months earlier, but they were family now.
Passionate about clearing Nick’s name, about proving that he had not committed suicide in any meaningful interpretation of the word, she had unknowingly set out on a path from which there could be no retreat. Those she sought to expose would not allow her to walk away and live even in the deep humiliation of defeat. They had brought something new and terrible into the world, with what purpose she still didn’t understand, and they intended to see their plan, whatever it might be, fulfilled at any cost. There was already much murder in it; two more killings—a mother and her son—would be to them not even so much as an inconvenience. She knew little, but she knew too much, and she suspected more, and there would be no one to whom she could risk turning for help until she knew it all.
The boy held fast to her. “I love you, Mom.”
She said, “I love you, too. So much. You rock me, kid.”
1
* * *
IN THE GOLDEN LIGHT of late afternoon, under scattered white clouds with gilded edges, Travis took his mother to visit the horses.
The stable stood in the deep shade of live oaks that shed their small oval leaves all year.
The surrounding ground was raked clean a few times a week. The swirls of parallel lines scored into the soft soil by the tines of the leaf rake resembled patterns that certain ancient shamans carved in stone to represent the mysterious turnings of fate, the endless cycles of a universe inscrutable in spite of its apparent design.
Bella and Sampson, mare and stallion, were housed side by side, facing two empty stalls, one of which had been fitted with a lower door to accommodate a pony not yet in residence.
The horses craned their necks over their stall doors to watch their visitors approach, and nickered in welcome.
In a paper cup, Travis carried a quartered apple, two pieces for each horse. With their soft lips, the animals finessed the treats from his small fingers.
He said, “Gavin hasn’t found the right pony yet.”
A month earlier, Jane had approved her son’s desire to learn to ride and Gavin’s preference that the child begin with a small mount.
“I couldn’t ride Sampson yet, but I’m pretty sure I could ride Bella if you guys would let me. She’s real gentle.”
“And like fifteen times your
size. Anyway, Sampson might be jealous if anyone but Jess rode her. He’s the only guy for Bella.”
“Do horses get jealous?”
“Oh, they do. Like Duke and Queenie get jealous if you pet the one a lot more than the other. Horses and dogs have shared their lives with people so long, they’ve come to have some of the same feelings we do.”
Bella lowered her head so far over the half door that Travis could reach high enough to stroke her cheeks, a ministration for which she had a special fondness.
“But I bet I could ride Bella if it was okay with Sampson.”
“Maybe you could, cowboy. But nobody becomes a master horseman if he’s not patient and willing to learn one step at a time.”
“Master horseman. That would be too cool.”
“Your dad was raised on a ranch, did some rodeo by the time he was seventeen. It’s in your blood. But so is common sense, so you be a good boy and listen to your common sense.”
“I will.”
“I know you will.”
She smoothed one hand along Sampson’s muscular neck, along that indentation called the jugular groove, and felt the power of his pulse against her palm.
The boy said, “Are you still looking for…the killer?”
“Yes. Every day.”
She hadn’t told him that his father committed suicide, and she never would. Anyone who ever repeated that lie to Travis would earn her enmity forever.
“Is it scary?” he asked.
“Not scary,” she lied. And then some truth: “A little dangerous sometimes, but you know I’ve been doing this for years and never even stubbed a toe.”
When not on leave, she provided investigation support for Behavioral Analysis Units 3 and 4, specifically dealing with mass murderers and serial killers.
“Not even a toe?”
“Not even.”
“ ’Cause you have common sense, huh?”