by Dean Koontz
Neither of the men reacted to her. She might as well have been made of clearest glass.
As they approached the dead girl, who was lying like a figment of a nightmare on the steel slab, the bigger of the two said, “It has to be dark for this.”
“It has been dark awhile,” said the other. “For two hours.”
“It has to be dark because of the smoke.”
“No one will see any smoke. This system hardly produces any smoke to see.”
The presence of the corpse, the fact of it, seemed not in the least to affect them.
“This is a good system. I like this system. But it produces some smoke.”
“This is a very good system. Anyway, the night is here.”
For a moment Jane thought they were playing a mind game with her, that they would suddenly draw their guns and pivot toward her. But then she remembered Overton’s words: They don’t see members because they’re…programmed.
Believing what William Overton had told her, she had dared to come here. Until she experienced this form of passive invisibility, however, she hadn’t been able to imagine how it might work.
Their eyes were not blind to her. The image of the room transmitted along their optic nerves to their brains included Jane as surely as it did the dead girl on the table. But some filtering program erased her from the brain’s interpretation of the image. She had used Overton’s member number and password at the gate and again at the front door, and because no alarm had sounded to announce that the perimeter of the house had been violated, these guards believed that the only people in the house were the girls and members who had come here to use them. The read-in from their eyes was the truth, but the readout from their brains was a lie.
Because the members of Aspasia didn’t want their faces on file anywhere in association with this enterprise, a fault existed in the security program, and that fault spared Jane’s life.
It was technology, but its effect was magic, a dark damn magic that she didn’t trust. While keeping the pistol trained on the men, she had eased backward, away from them, convinced that to move boldly past them in the direction of the hallway door would break the spell that they were under. She had retreated into a corner.
The taller man, six-four if he was an inch, went through the door into the crematorium.
The other one remained at the steel table, staring at the naked dead girl. If he raised his head, he would be looking directly at the corner where Jane stood.
And then he frowned. Until he frowned, his features were so placid that Jane wondered if any thought at all traveled through the landscape of his mind. Frowning, he looked up and turned his head side to side, scanning the room.
Perhaps it was imagination, but she thought his gaze paused for just an instant on the very space she occupied.
Still frowning, he cocked his head.
Jane held her breath. If his program did not allow him to see her, it would not allow him to hear her, either. Nevertheless, for that moment, she did not breathe.
The bones of his face were heavy, as if he had been crudely forged rather than born of man and woman, his brow a ledge from under which his eyes regarded the world with suspicion.
Finally, he looked down again at the dead girl, though with no greater emotion than if he had been staring at an empty table.
Rolling a stainless-steel gurney in front of him, the first man returned from the crematorium. As he positioned the gurney beside the table, he considered the naked blonde and said, “Number Four.”
“Number Four,” the shorter man agreed.
“We need to clean the room.”
“Make it ready for the new Number Four,” the shorter man confirmed.
Among computer gurus, there was a word for people who thought they were off the grid but weren’t. The word was fools. Only the tiniest fraction of those who believed they were off the grid—including dedicated end-of-the-world preppers—were in fact off it. Those who were truly untrackable, like Jane, and yet remained able by various means to use the Internet undetected were said to be “in the silent corner.”
She had been in the silent corner for two months, and right now, she was in the silent corner twice over, untrackable by all modern technology as well as by the five senses of these security men, and able to move about freely.
“Let’s burn it,” said the taller one.
“Burn it,” the shorter man agreed.
They moved the blonde from the table to the gurney as if they were handling bags of garbage, as if she was nothing and never had been anything.
This was one barbarity too many, an inexcusable indignity, and Jane could have shot them dead for their thoughtless treatment of the girl. But in their way, they were victims, too, and if they had been crude and vicious men before they had been subjected to brain implants, there was no way to prove it, no evidence sufficient to condemn them to death now. Anyway, they were already something akin to the walking dead.
As the two men maneuvered the gurney through the open door to feed the corpse into the Power-Pak III Cremation System, Jane backed away from them and out of the room. In the ground-floor hallway once more, she walked briskly toward the front door.
As she passed the stairs, she glanced up at the niches in which stood Venus and Aphrodite, white marble and larger than life-size.
Maybe it was the way they were uplighted or maybe Jane’s black mood affected her perception, but they no longer looked like pagan goddesses, not both glorious and terrible as before, but now only terrible, like beings that might preside over an Aztec altar upon which hearts were torn from living children.
At the front door, to be granted exit, she entered Overton’s membership number and password in another keypad. There was a delay of mere seconds that nonetheless she found nearly intolerable.
There could be no menace in the moon, and yet it hung over the night as if it were a dragon’s egg from which some world-ending beast would hatch.
At the garage stall, another keypad required another entry, but against her expectations, the segmented door rolled up to reveal the Bentley.
The phoenix palms canopied the driveway, and in that tunnel of boles and fronds, headlights approached her on the inbound lane. She was prepared to accelerate and slam through it if the vehicle swung across both lanes to block her, but a Maserati with tinted windows cruised past her without incident.
No keypad waited on this side of the gate. The two great panels of ironwork swung inward automatically as she approached, and she was granted exit.
She piloted the Bentley into a world that was immeasurably more precious to her than it had been when she had driven to Aspasia, a world imperiled under a vault of blind bright stars.
16
* * *
SHE SHOULD HAVE PARKED the Bentley in another block and walked past William Overton’s house from the farther side of the street, should have reconnoitered before entering the place, just in case he had gotten loose or gotten help. Instead, she drove directly into the center stall of three, parking between the red Ferrari and the black Tesla, and remoted the garage roll-up to roll down behind her. At the connecting door between the garage and the house, she entered the disarming code in the keypad and used the attorney’s house key and went inside, pistol in her right hand.
She had been cold to the bone since Aspasia, and the car heater had not warmed her. As chilled as she was, she remained nonetheless at a boil emotionally. Indignation, which is always controlled, had given way to a rage that threatened to drive her beyond the bounds of prudence and discretion. She wanted the guilty to pay. She wanted them to pay with everything they possessed, every dollar and drop of blood, wanted to strip from them their overweening pride and smug superiority. Her fear was twined now with horror, and she was afraid not just for Travis and herself, but for everyone and everything she loved, for her friends and her country, for the future of freedom and the dignity of the human heart.
Overton was lying in the master bathroom, where she ha
d left him, still shackled to the sink drain and cuffed to the leg of the antique bathtub. For at least part of the time that she’d been away, he had struggled to free himself. His badly abraded ankles oozed a bloody serum, because he had tried either to snap the heavy-duty cable tie or strip the one-way plastic zipper that could draw the tie tighter but never let it loosen. Or in his total ignorance of construction and plumbing techniques, maybe he thought it possible to pull the steel drain pipe out of the wall, though all he had succeeded in doing was cracking the marble cladding. He must have tried mightily to wedge his right shoulder and right knee under the bathtub and lever it off the floor enough to slip free the cable tie looped around one of its sturdy legs. But the large cast-iron tub with its baked-enamel finish weighed at least half a ton, probably two or three hundred pounds more than that; anyway, its water lines and drain line further secured it to wall and floor. He succeeded only in skinning his knee and bruising his shoulder. Hair lank and wet, body glistening with perspiration head to foot, Dolce & Gabbana underwear dark with sweat and perhaps with something else, he had proved to be a failure as an escape artist.
When Jane stepped into the bathroom doorway, Overton startled, turning upon her an expression of such abject fear that the woman she had been four months earlier might have had pity for him. But she wasn’t that woman; she might never be that woman again. Besides, his face was wrenched no less by purest hatred than by fear.
He flinched when she approached him with the scissors. She cut through the duct tape that wound about his head and did not care if it pulled his hair painfully. She made him use his tongue to press the partial washcloth from his mouth. He gagged and choked but at last expelled it.
She had said that she needed to liberate her younger sister from Aspasia, and Overton had known in what condition her sister would be found, forever altered and beyond any hope of liberation. He must think that he was now as good as dead and that his death would not be easy.
Looking down at him, she said, “Fancy place.”
“What?”
“Fancy place, that Aspasia.”
He said nothing.
“Don’t you think it’s a fancy place?”
When he still said nothing, she prodded him with the toe of her shoe. He said, “I guess so.”
“You guess what?”
“It’s a fancy place.”
“It’s a very fancy place, Sterling. Wow. I mean, no expense spared to make it feel respectable.”
Again, he said nothing.
“You were right about the guards. They pretended not to see me. How does that work, Sterling? How do they pretend so well?”
“I’ve told you all I know.”
“You’ve told me all you dare. That’s different.”
He turned his face away from her.
She did not goad him this time. She waited.
The silence grew intolerable for him. Still averting his face, he said, “Did you find her?”
“Did I find who?”
“You know who.”
“I don’t seem to know.”
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Did I find who?”
“You’re trying to make me say it so you can shoot me.”
“What a strange notion.”
“It’s what you’re doing,” he insisted.
“I don’t need an excuse to shoot you, Sterling. I already have a lot of good reasons to shoot you.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with Aspasia.”
“You’re a member—Vidar, god of gods, survivor of Ragnarok.”
“That’s all I am. A member. I didn’t build the place.”
“Ah, the old I-didn’t-build-Auschwitz-I-only-operated-the-gas-chamber defense.”
“Go to Hell.”
“I’m sure you can give me good directions.”
“You’re a gold-plated bitch.”
“If you stop being stupid, you can survive this. Is stupidity such a part of your character that maybe you can’t save yourself?”
“You want me dead. Just get it over with.”
“Speaking of dead people, I found a dead girl at Aspasia.”
Lying there in his sweat and blood, he shuddered.
She said, “A lovely blond girl naked on a stainless-steel table. She’d been strangled, perhaps at the very moment one of your fellow club members achieved his peak of pleasure.”
“Oh, shit,” he said, his voice breaking. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“I watched them getting ready to shove her poor body in a cremator and burn her all up.”
He was crying now, crying for himself. “Just do it to me.”
She gave him another long silence before she said, “She wasn’t my sister. I don’t have a sister. That was a lie.”
Jane could almost hear him reaching down into some internal darkness to dredge up a near-extinguished hope.
“Liars,” she said, “are always the first to fall for the lies of others.”
He turned his head to look up at her. His eyes were full of tears. His mouth was as soft as an infant’s.
Jane said, “I needed to understand Aspasia before I could go after Shenneck.”
His tears made his eyes harder to read, and perhaps he realized as much, because he said, “Shenneck? What’s Shenneck?”
“Maybe you are terminally stupid. Did you think the only thing Jimmy hacked from you was the Dark Web address for Aspasia? You’re a friend of Bertold Shenneck. Is friend the right word? Are people like you and Shenneck capable of friendship?”
“We…we have similar interests.”
“Yes, that’s probably closer to the truth. It’s something like the instinctive loyalty predators have for one another. And you’re an investor in Far Horizons.”
He closed his eyes. He was calculating whether the immediate threat she posed or Shenneck might be the more certain door to death.
“Did you pee yourself?” she asked.
Without opening his eyes, he said, “No.”
“I smell pee, and it’s not mine.”
Eyes still closed, he said, “What do you want to do with him, with Shenneck?”
“Expose what he’s doing. Bring him down. Stop him. Kill him.”
“Just you? Against him? You and who else?”
“Never mind who else. I’m the interrogator. Not you.”
He opened his eyes. “I don’t know as much as you probably think I do.”
“Let’s find out.”
She went into the bedroom, and he nervously asked where she was going, and she returned with a straight-backed chair.
She sat on the chair, looked him over, shook her head. “Yeah, you peed yourself. So tell me, the nanotech brain implants that control those girls…how are they installed? Not with surgery.”
He hesitated but gave it up. “Injection. The control mechanism is made up of thousands of parts, each just a few molecules. They migrate to the brain and self-assemble into a complex structure.”
“And the blood-brain barrier doesn’t screen them out?”
“No. I don’t know why. I’m no scientist. It’s just part of Shenneck’s…genius.”
The blood-brain barrier was a complex biological mechanism that permitted vital substances in the blood to penetrate the walls of the brain’s capillaries and enter the brain tissue, while keeping out harmful substances.
“How do all these tiny parts, all these machines made of a handful of molecules, know how to self-assemble when they get into the brain?”
“They’re sort of programmed. But not exactly by Shenneck. It’s all about precise design. If all the parts are perfectly designed to fit together like a long series of puzzle pieces, like locks and keys, and if each piece has only one place it will fit in the larger structure, then Brownian movement makes it inevitable that they’ll link up properly.”
“Progress by random motion,” she said. “A drunkard’s walk.”
“Yeah. Shenneck says it happens in nature all the time.�
�
“Ribosomes,” she said, remembering that example from Shenneck’s video about the mice.
Ribosomes were mitten-shaped organelles that existed in great numbers in the cytoplasm of every human cell. They were the sites where proteins were manufactured. Each ribosome had more than fifty different components. If you broke down a slew of them into their separate parts and thoroughly mixed them up in a suspending fluid, then Brownian movement—caused by encounters with molecules of the suspending medium—kept knocking them against one another until the fifty-some parts assembled into whole ribosomes.
If the thousands of parts in Shenneck’s control mechanism were each perfectly designed to fit only one place in a larger structure, the forces of nature would ensure they linked up in the brain. At every level from the subatomic to the formation of galaxies, nature routinely created complex structures because the perfection of its operative designs made its various constructions inevitable.
“Once a control mechanism is in place in the brain of one of these poor girls,” Jane said, “is there any way to undo it, any way she can ever be again who she once was?”
Her question clearly stressed Overton, and he read in it a judgment of himself that unnerved him. “Shenneck built it this way. I didn’t have anything to do with how he designed it.”
“Good for you.”
“There should have been…I don’t know, it’s not the right word, but there should have been an antidote.”
As if a sleeker design would have made Frankenstein’s monster less of a monster and his maker a hero.
“So there’s no way to undo it?” she asked.
“No. The controller breaks down the existing personality and deletes the memories that helped to form it. The result is a new level of…call it consciousness. Shenneck has been adamant about…”
Unthinkingly, he chewed his lower lip, breaking the fragile clot that had begun to heal the split, bringing forth fresh blood.
“Keep going, Sterling. It’s show-and-tell day. You remember show-and-tell from elementary school? Earn your gold star, your works-well-with-others checkmark on your next report card. Tell me what Bertold Shenneck has been adamant about.”