by Dean Koontz
“Menlo Park, California?”
“Yes. Shenneck’s laboratories are there. You’ve heard of him?”
“No.”
“Bertold Shenneck. He’s racked up just about every important science prize except the Nobel.”
“Would you spell his name for me?”
Sidney spelled it. “He’s on the cutting edge—he is the cutting edge—when it comes to designing brain implants to eventually help people with motor neuron diseases, like later-stage ALS patients with locked-in syndrome. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”
“Lou Gehrig’s disease,” she said.
“That’s right. Eileen was quite impressed with him.”
The green tongues of the overhanging tree trembled in a mild breeze, and shadows licked at the scattered morsels of sunlight that glimmered on the windshield.
“The two nights—where did Eileen stay?”
“I thought you might ask. I’ve become accustomed to your FBI way of thinking, though it seems unduly suspicious. She stayed at the Stanford Park Hotel. About half a mile from Stanford University. I’ve been there once myself. It’s a lovely place.”
“You’ve visited Dr. Shenneck’s lab?”
“No, this was a few years ago. I was in the area to present a bid on an architectural project.”
“Do you know where your wife ate dinner?”
“The first night at the Menlo Grill, which is in the hotel. I ate there myself and recommended it to her.”
“And the second night?”
“Along with a few other people, she was a guest for dinner at Dr. Shenneck’s home. She found him and his wife very charming.”
“This was a week before the migraine she had at the Harvard conference.”
“Eight or nine days before the migraine.”
“Her first and only migraine,” Jane noted.
“I understand the need for a detective to question everything, but I can assure you Dr. Shenneck will lead you nowhere.”
“On what grounds can you assure me of that, Sidney?”
“On the grounds of his accomplishments. He’s a humanitarian. There’s nothing nefarious about him. It’s laughable to think so.”
“You’re probably right. Thank you for your time, Sidney. I can’t imagine I’ll be bothering you again.”
“Oh, you’ve never been a bother. I understand your obsession, the grief that drives it. I hope you find acceptance and peace.”
“You’ve been kind,” she said. “And I’d enjoy talking with you again. But though it might be only my FBI way of thinking, I’d bet almost anything that there’s a third ear on this call, in addition to yours and mine. Just one thing. In the last year, did you ever go to a conference with your wife and stay overnight?”
“No. In our personal lives, Eileen and I were as tight as two people ever were, but our professional lives were worlds apart.”
“I’m relieved to know it. Relieved for you. Good-bye, Sidney.”
After switching off the phone, she cruised a nearby residential area until she found a house under construction, a Dumpster standing at the curb. Although she had burned through only a fraction of the minutes that came with the phone, she chose not to risk its further use. From her open window, she tossed it into the open Dumpster and drove away.
She headed for Pierce College, which was only a few miles away and no doubt boasted a good library with Internet access.
19
* * *
AT PIERCE COLLEGE, she bought a parking pass from a dispenser. Numerous trees—oaks, conifers, ficuses—graced the lovely campus.
No demonstrations were under way in support of one utopian vision or another. Good. College and university libraries were problematic if she might be delayed by angry placard-bearing crowds and in danger of being captured on camera by the media that raced to cover such events regardless of their frequency.
With its dramatic clock tower and massive cantilevered roof over the main-entrance stairs, the library was a bold and handsome structure. The computer lab lay in the northwest corner of the ground floor, at the moment deserted.
She sat in the back row of workstations, where no one could sit behind her.
Dr. Bertold Shenneck proved to be a big deal. His name came with so many links that she would need weeks to read everything that had been written about him.
She went to the Shenneck Technology website, a trove of data. There were numerous videos featuring Shenneck, crafted to explain aspects of his work and to elicit multimillion-dollar grants from government and industry.
In the most recent one, Shenneck was a youngish-looking fifty-year-old with a full head of dark hair, the face of a kindly uncle, and a smile as appealing as that of any of the more benign Muppets. If he was an intellectual giant, he was also a superb salesman whose enthusiasm for the potential of biotechnology would be contagious when he was pitching his plans to the captains of industry and to politicians who controlled the biggest purse strings.
The computer-lab door opened. A man entered. Early thirties. Clean but tousled hair, a carefully crafted disarrangement. Tall. A tan so even it had to have come from a machine. One of those laser-bleached smiles.
He wore an upscale blue sport coat with a somewhat loose cut, leaving room for a weapon if he was licensed to carry. A chambray shirt with the tail out. Pale-gray chinos. Rubber-sole Rockports instead of loafers or other leather-sole shoes. Rockports provided excellent traction if you had to move fast and chase someone down. Jane usually wore Rockports. This guy had the right look for a certain kind of undercover assignment.
She did not return his smile. She focused again on the computer screen, but she remained aware of him with her peripheral vision.
He went to the workstation at the farther end of the row that she had chosen.
Reading descriptions of the other Shenneck videos, Jane settled on one that mentioned light-sensitive proteins, reading-out brain implants, and thought-translation software. It covered the same ground as the TV story she’d seen while waiting in bed for Nick, six days before his death. In fact, she suspected Bertold Shenneck had been one of several researchers who appeared in that news piece, for his face had looked vaguely familiar to her in the previous video.
The hope-filled story of brain implants that would one day allow mute patients to think what they wanted to say and have their thoughts become speech through a computer had remained with her the past four months. She’d thought it stuck in her memory because it was the last thing she’d seen on TV that night before Nick had come to bed, raised her hand to his lips, and said, You rock me.
At the farther end of the row, the newcomer hadn’t yet powered up his computer.
He made a call on his smartphone. His voice was so low that Jane couldn’t make out a word. The call was at most a minute long.
She was acutely conscious of time passing, but she did not believe she could already be in danger. The conspirators who seemed to be able to identify her explorations of sensitive websites, who seemed to be able to track-to-source the computer she was using, might be on to her right now if Shenneck was somehow related to the increase in suicides. But they couldn’t possibly get here and take her down mere minutes after she logged on to Shenneck Technology.
Yesterday, she had told Gwyn Lambert that she was going to see someone in the San Diego area, so the hunters had been given a few hours to seed their people at key points in the metropolitan maze. She was not nearly as vulnerable today.
She quickly scanned the descriptions of Bertold Shenneck’s many videos. When she saw the words NANO-MACHINE BRAIN IMPLANTS AND THE POTENTIAL TO CONTROL LIVESTOCK FOR MORE EFFICIENT HUSBANDRY, her interest was piqued, and she clicked on that selection.
At the end of the row, Rockport Man made another phone call.
The video that Jane selected began. With his usual avuncular charm, compelling presentation, and authoritative voice, Bertold Shenneck pitched a futuristic—though soon achievable—system for livestock monitoring and co
ntrol. Nano-machines were constructed of a minimal number of molecules, invisible to the human eye. Programmed like computers, they could be injected in tiny units that self-assembled into a network once inside the animal. If they weren’t self-replicating, only self-assembling, they wouldn’t endanger the body by consuming its carbon to make more of themselves. They would be perpetually powered by tapping a host animal’s own electrical activity. The nano-machines could monitor and transmit details of the animal’s health, could even identify a communicable disease when it was still limited to a few individuals in the population. Through such technology, poultry flocks and cattle herds and other animals could be controlled to eliminate fighting as well as stampedes and other panic responses that led to stock deaths and damage.
“Excuse me,” said the man at the other computer.
Jane turned her head, met his eyes.
“Are you a student here?”
“Yes,” she lied.
“What’s your major?”
“Child development. Excuse me, but I don’t want to miss anything in this video.” She returned her attention to the screen.
Assume a third ear had been listening to her and Sidney Root.
Assume they figured she was still somewhere in California.
Assume Bertold Shenneck was up to his neck in this.
Assume that just fifteen minutes after she terminated the call to Sidney, her enemy’s security software alerted them to a search of Shenneck Technology’s website from a Pierce College workstation.
If those assumptions were correct, depending on the extent of their resources, especially if they were able to call on a spectrum of government agencies for manpower, they might reach her sooner than she, even in the worst throes of paranoia, thought possible.
She watched the screen with her head turned slightly to her right, keeping Rockport Man in sight just enough to know if he suddenly rose from his chair.
Still facing her, he had not yet turned on his computer.
Bertold Shenneck, using a pack of forty white mice with nano-machine brain implants, provided a vivid visualization of how a herd of larger animals might one day be managed more efficiently. Turned loose in a room, the mice raced helter-skelter. When a technician at a computer keyboard transmitted a command to the implants, the mice froze all in the same instant. As other commands were given, the forty rodents moved as one in the same direction, wall to wall and back again; formed into single file and circumnavigated the test room; came together into four groups of ten each and went to the corners and waited for whatever was required of them next.
The video ended a minute after the mice. She was grateful for that. She had seen enough to be iced to the bone, a chill so deep it couldn’t be soothed by warm air, hot coffee, or anything but time.
When Jane logged off, Rockport Man said, “Friends call me Sonny. What’s your name?”
“Melanie,” she lied.
“You sure have a look, Melanie. Edgy but stylin’.”
She had all but forgotten the purple wig and eye shadow and West Hollywood clothes.
“I like your look. You in your second year or first?” he asked.
Getting up from her computer, she said, “First.”
He rose to his feet as well.
As the guy reached under his jacket with his right hand, Jane reached under her open biker’s jacket to the Heckler & Koch.
Instead of a gun, he produced a long ID wallet of the kind that might have contained a badge. From it, he took a business card. “My people and I were meeting with the director of library services about using the library as a location. Film location.” He held out the card.
Her clutched stomach relaxed. Acid eased back down her throat but left a bitter taste. She withdrew her hand from her jacket and picked up her purse.
When she showed no interest in the card, he approached, holding it out to her.
“I’m not into movies,” she said.
“When opportunity knocks,” he said, “it doesn’t cost anything to listen.” He had a killer smile—or thought he did. “Anyway, it doesn’t have to be about business.”
“I’m married.”
As she turned away, he said, “Me, too. Second wife. Life is complicated, huh?”
She faced him again. His bleached teeth looked radioactive. “Yeah,” she said. “Complicated. Damn complicated.”
“Take the card. Look at the name. You’ll know it. What’ve you got to lose? Make a new friend. Nothing more. A quiet dinner.”
That damn bitter acid taste.
Purse slung over her left shoulder, she reached under her jacket with her right hand and drew the pistol and held it at arm’s length, a foot from his face, as steady as if she were a statue carved in stone.
His chambray shirt had a gray warp and a green weft, and both colors seemed to flush his face under the machine-smooth tan. He was either unable to find words or unable to speak.
She couldn’t believe what she was doing. She couldn’t stop herself from doing it.
“For dinner,” she said, “let’s say we put an apple in your mouth, bury you in a pit of hot coals, and have a luau later.”
He needed to make an effort to speak. “I…I have two children.”
“Glad for you, sorry for them. Back up and sit down.”
He backed into the chair at the computer that he had not used.
“You sit there five minutes, Sonny. Five full minutes. You come after me, I’ll spare those two kids the ongoing misery of a rotten father. Are we clear?”
“Yes.”
She holstered the pistol. She turned her back on him. It was a test, and he passed it, remaining in the chair.
At the door, as she went out of the room, she turned off the lights. Darkness was conducive to contemplation.
20
* * *
SHE DROVE FROM suburb to suburb, the lowering sun orange behind her, the shadow-filled world tilting all its distorted silhouettes eastward.
More than once, when she stopped at a red traffic light, she adjusted the rearview mirror to look into the reflection of her eyes. She didn’t see crazy yet, but she wondered if it was coming.
She had long thought of herself as a rock. But rock, too, could fracture. Under enough pressure, even granite crumbled, decomposed.
Pulling her gun on that asshole Sonny had been stupid. He might have reacted recklessly. Someone might have walked into the room as she was drawing down on him.
She told herself that the problem arose from too little sleep. She needed a long night of rest. If there were bad dreams that woke her, well, she would have to roll over and give herself to them for whatever rest nightmares allowed.
She couldn’t bear the thought of eating in a restaurant, of ordering from a waiter, of smiling at the busboy, of listening to the table talk of other customers.
Some days she grew sick of people, maybe because she had to interact with too many of the wrong kind. She recalled the mother and the asthmatic boy on the bus bench, a friendly salesclerk in West Hollywood, but they weren’t enough to bring balance to the day.
She cruised in search of takeout for dinner and found a deli that wasn’t a plastic-and-plain-bread franchise. A reuben sandwich that weighed nearly a pound. A dill pickle, huge and fragrant. A quarter pound of champagne cheese for dessert and two bottles of Diet Coke filled the bag.
At the motel, after she filled the ice bucket in the vending-machine alcove, she locked her door and closed the draperies.
She stripped off the leather jacket. Removed the purple wig and brushed out her hair. Washed off the eye shadow and purple lipstick.
She looked tired. She did not look defeated.
There was a clock-radio on one nightstand. She couldn’t locate a classical-music station and settled for one playing oldies. Taylor Dayne’s “Love Will Lead You Back.”
A small round table allowed dining for two. She sat across from the empty chair, put her pistol on the table, unpacked the deli bag.
In a motel glass, she mixed Coca-Cola and vodka over ice. The sandwich was delicious.
The deejay promised three hits by the Eagles, no commercial interruptions. The first was “Peaceful Easy Feeling.”
Jane was overcome by a yearning as sharp as a razor’s edge. At first she thought her longing was for Nick. But though she missed him every day, she was too practical to pine so intensely for what could never be. And though she longed for Travis, this wasn’t about her boy, either. She yearned for home, a place of the heart where she belonged, which was almost as useless as wishing Nick’s death could be undone, for she had no home anymore and no prospect of one.
21
* * *
SHE LEFT A WAKE-UP CALL for 6:30 and then sat in an armchair in the dark, the only light a bone-white blade that stabbed out of the bathroom through the gap between door and jamb. Drinking vodka-and-Coke, listening to the radio, she thought about Bertold Shenneck up there in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco. On the edge of Silicon Valley if not in it. The kingdom of tech miracles. She expected she would dream of regimented mice, and most likely worse.
A busy day ahead. For starters, meeting Jimmy Radburn in Palisades Park and getting out of there alive with the information he brought her.
Not yet drunk, she dared not drink any more. She undressed, went to the queen-size bed, and tucked the pistol under the pillow that would have been Nick’s.
She lay listening to the radio, which had begun to deliver a Bob Seger triple-play. “Still the Same” was all right, but when the second number was “Tryin’ to Live My Life Without You,” she had to turn off the radio. These days, certain music, certain books, certain words had meanings for her that they’d never had before.
Although she was troubled by strange dreams, she seldom woke. When she did ascend briefly from sleep, it was to the dire serenade of sirens waxing and waning, more sirens than would have pierced the suburban peace only a decade or two earlier, as though some wicked master of a form of origami akin to quantum mechanics spent the night folding the evils of the world into places that had once been less afflicted by them.