The Silent Corner

by Dean Koontz

  “He’s adamant that the design can allow no possible pathway for rebellion.”

  “So once they’re enslaved, it’s forever.”

  Overton clearly didn’t like the word enslaved, as though there could be any other, but after a hesitation, he said, “Yes. But they don’t see their condition the way you do. They’re content. More than content. They’re happy.”

  Jane worked her tongue around her mouth and nodded sagely, as if considering his argument, when in fact she was suppressing the urge to pistol-whip him. “I found your smartphone in the closet. You must have Shenneck’s numbers on speed dial. Give me your password, tell me how I get everything you’ve got.”

  Alarmed, he said, “You can’t call him.”

  “Sure I can. I know how to use a phone.”

  “He’ll know it’s me you got the numbers from.”

  “As if that’s your biggest worry.”

  “You’re a real piece of shit.”

  “You like having two eyes, Billy?”

  “You couldn’t torture anybody.”

  “That’s what I said before I saw Aspasia. I have a new appreciation for extreme measures. Which eye don’t you need?”

  He gave her the password.

  She went into the bedroom, worked with the phone, got his address book, scrolled through it. Good enough. She switched the phone off.

  In the bathroom again, she said, “Okay. I understand Aspasia. Some sick, twisted people are self-absorbed adolescents all their lives. Other people aren’t fully real to them. Know what I mean? Of course you do. But why this other project of Shenneck’s?”

  Overton pretended ignorance. “What other project?”

  “What’s the intention of engineering thousands of more suicides every year? Why program people to kill themselves, sometimes to kill others and then themselves? Why did Dr. Shenneck inject his self-assembling control mechanism into my husband and direct him to kill himself?”

  17

  * * *

  PERHAPS A NATURAL TAN would have sustained better, but William Overton’s machine tan seemed to react chemically with his sweat and with the pheromones of terror that his body expressed in abundance. His beach-guy glow acquired a gray patina, the way copper will in time develop one that’s green.

  Overton had thought he would be killed because of a sister, and when the sister turned out not to exist, he had thought there might be hope of a reprieve. But now his captor had a husband. And the husband was dead.

  “Billy?” she said.

  His dread was palpable. He closed his eyes again, as if the sight of himself in his current condition could not be borne. “How do you know about this?”

  “The engineered suicides? It doesn’t matter how I know, Billy. All that matters is I know, and I need answers.”

  “For God’s sake, who are you?”

  She considered his question and decided to answer it. “Let’s talk movies. You want to talk movies?”

  “Something’s wrong with you. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Just humor me, Billy. It’s always wise to humor me. You’ve probably seen that old movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

  “Newman and Redford.”

  “That’s right. They’re being chased by this posse that just won’t quit. At one point they look back across a vast landscape and they’re still being pursued, and they can’t believe the doggedness of that posse. Butch says to Sundance—or Sundance says to Butch, I don’t remember which—he says, ‘Who are those guys?’ He says it like maybe they’re supernatural or they’re fate personified. See, Billy, all you need to know is—I’m those guys.”

  When Overton opened his eyes and shifted uncomfortably in his plastic shackles, he appeared to be resigned, at last, to complete cooperation. “It’s not Shenneck’s intention or mine, or anyone’s, that ninety percent of the population will end up programmed like those girls at Aspasia. Or even fifty percent. That’s not a world anyone would want to live in.”

  “So even Shenneck has moral limits? Or is it merely a matter of practicality? Might be impossible to produce the billions of injections that would enslave all but the elite.”

  He soldiered on. “There are people in all professions who have greater influence on society than they should.”

  “What people would they be?”

  “Those who push the culture in the wrong direction.”

  “What direction would that be, Billy?”

  “Anyone who knows history well enough can see what the wrong directions are. It’s plain as anything.” In touch now with his inner fanatic, he found himself capable of a defiant tone even as he lay there in squalor. “Identify those who have the potential to press civilization to the brink, diminish their influence—”

  “By killing them,” she said.

  He ignored the interruption. “—and it won’t be necessary to use Bertold’s technology on the masses. There will be less death, not more, less poverty, less anxiety, if we restrain those who are most likely to screw up the country with bad policies.”

  He could not entirely conceal his enthusiasm. He might be an investor in Far Horizons for profit, but he had drunk the Kool-Aid.

  “Nick,” she said, “that was my husband’s name. You don’t care what his name was, but I care. Nick was in the Marine Corps. A full colonel at thirty-two. He was awarded the Navy Cross. You wouldn’t know what that is, but it’s really something. He was a good man, a caring husband, a damn fine father.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Overton said. He was capable of a self-righteous reaction. He amazed her. “Don’t lay this on me. You have no right to lay it on me. I don’t decide who’s put on the list.”

  “What list?”

  “The Hamlet list. Like the play. If someone had killed Hamlet in the first act, a lot more people would’ve been alive at the end.”

  “Seriously, is that how you read it, you’re a Shakespeare scholar now?”

  In frustration he rattled the series of looped cable ties that secured his wrists to the bathtub. “I haven’t read the damn thing. Shenneck calls it the Hamlet list. I don’t have anything to do with it. I told you, I don’t decide who’s on the list.”

  “Who does decide?”

  “No one. The computer decides. The computer model.”

  She could feel her pulse beating in her temples. “Who wrote the computer model? You design a model to get what you want to get. And the model has to be given names of candidates to choose from. What sonofabitch inputs the names?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re an investor.”

  “But I don’t work in the freakin’ damn lab!”

  She drew a deep breath. Her forefinger had slipped onto the trigger of the Heckler & Koch. She moved it back to the trigger guard. “One of the people on your Hamlet list was Eileen Root in Chicago. She worked in a nonprofit, helping people with severe disabilities. What do you think she might have done to become a danger to civilization?”

  “I don’t know. How would I know? I don’t choose the names for the list.”

  “One of them was a poet. He threw himself in front of a subway train. One was a prodigy, a twenty-year-old graduate student, she was working on a doctorate in cosmology. Cosmology! What could either of them have done to be a threat to civilization?”

  “You aren’t listening to me.”

  “I’m listening. I’m all ears, Billy. What could they have done?”

  “I don’t know. The computer model knows.”

  She got up from her chair, thrust it backward into the bedroom, loomed over him. “This Hamlet list. How many are on it?”

  “I tell you, and you won’t like it.”

  “Try me. How many have to be killed?”

  “You’re not in control of yourself. You’re overwrought.”

  “Try me!”

  “All right, okay. Anyway, Shenneck says they aren’t being killed. They’re being culled. No herd remains healthy if its weakest individuals aren’t c
ulled from time to time.”

  “I don’t want to kill you,” Jane said, by which she meant that she didn’t want to kill him just yet. “How many are on the list?”

  He closed his eyes against the sight of the muzzle. “The computer model says, in a country the size of ours, two hundred and ten thousand culled in each generation will ensure stability.”

  She had to swallow a reflux of acid before she could say, “How do you define a generation?”

  “I don’t define anything. The computer model defines it as twenty-five years.”

  “So eight thousand four hundred a year.”

  “Something like that.”

  She kicked him in the hip. She kicked him in the ribs. She could have kept on kicking him until she was exhausted, but she turned away from him and went into the bedroom and kicked the straight-backed chair, which slammed into the dresser.

  18

  * * *

  JANE TOOK THE SCISSORS out of her handbag and returned to the bathroom with them and the pistol.

  Overton turned on his side as best he could, trying to shield his pathetic package from her. “What now, what are you gonna do?”

  She had convinced him that she was capable of committing the most cruel and gruesome offenses. Maybe she had convinced herself, too. “Another thing I need to know.”

  “What?”

  “No more of your stupidity. All I have time for is straight-up answers.”

  “So ask.”

  “How hard will it be to get at Shenneck?”

  “What does get at mean?”

  “Get him in a situation like this, make him talk.”

  “About impossible.”

  “Nothing’s impossible. Look where you are.”

  “I’m a few steps down the food chain from Shenneck. I was easy. He won’t be. I ever get out of this, I won’t be, either.”

  She worked the scissors. The sound of the blades sharpened his anxiety. “Shenneck Technology in Menlo Park?”

  “The labs have layers of electronic security. Fingerprint readers. Retinal readers. Armed guards. Cameras everywhere.”

  “What about his house in Palo Alto?”

  “You ever seen it?”

  “Maybe I have. But you tell me.”

  He answered every question she asked about the house, and if he wasn’t lying, the place had forbidding security.

  She said, “I read he has a getaway place in Napa Valley.”

  “Yeah. He calls it Gee Zee Ranch. Gee Zee for Ground Zero.”

  “What a self-important ass.”

  “He likes his little jokes, that’s all,” said Overton, taking mild offense on Shenneck’s behalf. “He spends like two weeks there every month. He’s there now. He can work from there as easy as if he’s in the labs. The lab computers are accessible to him there.”

  “Is he more vulnerable there?”

  Overton’s laugh was sour, bleak. “If you can get through all the coyotes and rayshaws, he’s vulnerable. But you can’t get through them. If you’d gone there first, you’d be dead, and I wouldn’t be where I am.”

  “So tell me about the coyotes and the whatevers.”

  “The rayshaws.” He took dark delight in describing the difficulty of an assault on Gee Zee Ranch, as if he had embraced the idea of his own death and could find pleasure only in the certainty that she would soon meet hers.

  When she understood the setup at the ranch and felt Overton had not withheld anything, she said, “So I’m going to cut the tie between your ankles. You try to kick me, I’ll shoot your balls off. Got that?”

  Pretending indifference, he said, “You’ll do what you’ll do.”

  “That’s right.”

  With the scissors, she cut through the plastic zip tie.

  “Same rules apply,” she said. She cut the tie connecting him to the leg of the bathtub, though she left his wrists bound together.

  She backed out of the bathroom, put aside the scissors, and stood just beyond the doorway, watching him try to get onto his hands and knees and then try to rise.

  His muscles had cramped, and he had further tortured them by his efforts to free himself. He needed a minute to crawl to the fancy amber-quartz sink and grip it and struggle to his feet. The visible spasms in his calf and thigh muscles couldn’t be faked. He didn’t exaggerate the agony by crying out, but instead clenched his jaws and stifled his groans, breathing as hard as a well-run horse, as if to exhale the pain, still possessed of enough macho self-image to want to conceal from her how weak the ordeal had left him.

  He came around the room rather than directly across it, legs still shaky, supporting himself with the sink, then with the bar handle on the walk-in shower, then with a towel rack, then with the door handle.

  Jane backed farther into the living room. She didn’t have the pistol in a two-hand grip, because she didn’t find him threatening and she wanted him to know that she didn’t. His mind was a field of ashes, most of his hope gone. But there were hot coals of anger under the ashfield, and any indication that she still respected him as an adversary would feed his ego and fan flames from those coals.

  When he had cleared the doorway, he declared, “I need to sit down a minute,” and he wobbled toward the bed.

  She said, “If why you want to sit there is the Smith & Wesson in the nightstand drawer, it isn’t there anymore.” She indicated the straight-backed chair she had kicked into the dresser and that now stood in the middle of the room. “You could sit there till you feel better.”

  “Bite me, bitch.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Bite me.”

  “Such adolescent shit. You should hear yourself.”

  “I hear myself just fine.”

  “You don’t really. You probably never have.”

  “You’re a gash with a gun, that’s all you are.”

  “And what are you?”

  “I don’t need to sit anywhere.”

  “So show me the safe, tough guy.”

  “It’s in the closet.”

  She said, “Behind the mirror, most likely.”

  “You know everything, huh?”

  “Not everything.”

  The walk-in closet was big, maybe fifteen feet wide and twenty deep. The hanging clothes were hidden behind doors, everything else in drawers of various sizes. In the center of the room stood an upholstered bench where he could sit to put on socks and shoes. At the back wall, a full-length mirror was inlaid between cabinets.

  She let him get nearly to the mirror before she stepped into the closet behind him.

  He was watching her in the looking glass and saw her take the pistol in a two-hand grip. “Gonna shoot me in the back?”

  “It’s an option.”

  “Just like a woman.”

  “Is that supposed to rile me?”

  “If I’m dead, you’re dead.”

  “So this is where you say you’ve got friends who’ll never stop till they find me and cut off my head?”

  “Wait and see.”

  “None of your friends are your friends, Billy.”

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall.”

  The mirror slid aside, disappeared behind adjacent cabinetry, evidently responding to those five words and perhaps to the specific timbre of his voice.

  He now stood before a brushed stainless-steel panel. He leaned forward, putting his right eye to a round glass lens embedded in the steel. The pattern of each person’s retina was as unique as any of his fingerprints.

  Jane heard a series of lock bolts retracting, and the steel panel whisked up into the ceiling with a pneumatic sound.

  “Here’s your money, more money than you’ve ever seen.”

  His body blocked her view of the contents of the safe.

  “Five hundred thousand bucks.”

  He reached into the safe, perhaps to pick up a bundle of cash.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  He started to turn to his left, bringing his zip-tied hands cross-body. He
thought he was fast. He assumed she would be thinking about half a million dollars.

  She said don’t, but he did, and he was so much slower than he thought he would be that when her first round took him high in the left side, just under the arm, he fired reflexively into a cabinet door less than halfway through the 180-degree arc that he imagined completing. During firearms instruction at the Academy, having worked diligently for weeks to improve her hand strength, Jane had been able to pull the trigger ninety-six times in one minute with her right hand, using a practice revolver, which surpassed the standard required by the instructor. In pitched combat, a weak hand could quickly be a dead hand. Her be-sure shot, less than a second after the first, changed the shape of Overton’s head, instantly stopped his incessant scheming, and dropped him to the floor.

  19

  * * *

  THE WEAPON OVERTON HAD used was a customized Sig Sauer P226 X-Six with a nineteen-shot magazine. It had boomed in the confines of the closet. Even with a sound suppressor, Jane’s pistol had a voice, louder than it would have been in a larger space or outdoors. But she was confident that none of the three shots would have attracted attention beyond the walls of this well-built house.

  Considering how many enemies he’d made and further considering the nature of his associates, the attorney had most likely stashed handguns throughout the residence, so that he would always be within easy reach of a weapon. The safe was a miniature armory, holding a 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun, two revolvers, and another pistol in addition to the one with which he had hoped to kill her.

  The pistol he had chosen not to use was a Colt .45 ACP. The engraved name of one of the finest custom shops in the country at once intrigued her. The gun had evidently been completely rebuilt and among the improvements were Heinie night sights. There was also a silencer for it.

  If the pistol had been used in a crime, Overton would have disposed of it. She might have found the replacement for her Heckler & Koch, which was now tied to two killings. They were killings in self-defense, therefore neither of them a murder, but even if all this turned out better than she hoped, she wasn’t going to spend ten percent of the rest of her life in a courtroom, explaining herself.