by Dean Koontz
“Come apart how?”
Emily looked up from her hands, having paled so that her freckles appeared brighter than before. “It seemed to evaporate, dissolve. No. It was more like…the way certain salts absorb moisture from the air and just deliquesce.”
This was nothing that Jane had expected, and she felt again that she was dealing with forces so cunning and powerful that they might as well have been supernatural. “There was a residue?”
“Yes. Thin, almost clear. I sent a sample to the lab. If they ever analyzed it, I was never told.”
“You filed your report that same day.”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t alone during the autopsy.”
“There was an assistant pathologist. Charlie Weems. He was terrified. He’s a fan of sci-fi. He thought what we saw meant an alien invasion. Hell, so did I.”
“He confirmed your report?”
“At first. But I’d told him Benedetta was my niece. And pretty soon…within hours, he wasn’t backing me up anymore.”
“You were forced out—when?”
“The next day. Leave with severance pay or be fired. Not much of a choice, really.”
“And where is Charlie Weems right now?”
“He’s been promoted. He has my job. And welcome to it.” She worked her hands as if her fists had been clenched so tight that her fingers were numb. “So the FBI is on this now, huh? Really on this?”
“On it but not announced. A quiet investigation. I have to ask you to keep our discussion to yourself. You can understand why.”
“People would panic, everyone would think they’re controlled, whether they are or not.”
“Exactly. You told Benedetta’s sister, husband, mom, dad?”
Emily shook her head. “No. It was too insane, too…awful. At first I said tests were under way. Then I said a brain tumor.”
“Did they wonder why you left your job?”
“I told them I’d spent too much time with the dead. It’s a job no one understands why you took, and everyone gets why you’d quit.”
“And what about you? Eight months you’ve lived with this.”
“I never used to stress about anything. Now I stress about everything. But I don’t dream about it as much as I first did.” She looked at the Kandinsky prints—the brightly colored, energetic, and meaningless forms. “So many things happen anymore, the world going so fast, you find yourself accepting things that once would have broken your heart or driven you crazy. It’s like life used to be a carrousel, now a high-speed roller coaster.” She turned her eyes on Jane again. “I live with knowing what I saw. What else is there to do? But deep down, I’m terrified.”
“I am, too. We all are,” Jane said, implying that scores of agents were seeking the truth, a lie that was the only comfort she could give.
2
* * *
IN SPITE OF THE TIME-ZONE CHANGE, it was still mid-morning when Nathan Silverman landed at Austin International, received his rental car, and left the city on U.S. 290. As the highway ascended the Edwards Plateau, there was far more sky than land, so that the Texas plains falling to every side were vast yet felt insubstantial.
He had worked many weekends during his career in the Bureau. Never before, however, had he devoted a Saturday to an investigation that did not yet have a case number or an open file.
This would also be the first time he paid out of pocket for airline fares and other expenses with little hope of reimbursement.
He had not even bothered to learn whether one of the Bureau’s Gulfstream V jets might be scheduled for a flight to Texas, with an empty seat available. The Gulfstreams were primarily for counterterrorism and weapons-of-mass-destruction operations. They might be needed for travel related to the Philadelphia investigation. Anyway, the attorney general had authority over the FBI, and the most recent three often commandeered the Gulfstreams for their personal travel, whether that was entirely ethical or not.
By one route and another, trusting to the soft voice of the GPS, he came to a private lane. Low stone posts supported an iron framework that arced overhead and incorporated letters that spelled HAWK. From there on, the GPS had no more advice for him.
Flanked by ranch fencing, overhung here and there by an oak, the blacktop had been poured on bare earth and rolled out hard and patched as weather potholed it and furnished with new borders when time crumbled it at the edges.
Rich green grasslands lay all around. On the left, brown-and-white cattle grazed. On the right were sheep.
The two-story white-clapboard residence, shaded by ancient oaks, stood well separate from the immense barn to the south and the tree-shaded stables to the north. In a graveled parking area were a Ford 550 truck and a paneled van. He left the rental beside them and climbed the front porch steps and rang the bell.
The day was warm but not hot, still but with a feeling that the stillness might be precarious.
He had met Clare and Ancel Hawk, Nicholas’s parents, when Nick and Jane were married in Virginia, almost seven years earlier. He doubted that either of them would remember him.
She answered the door, fifty-something, tall and trim and lovely, graying hair cropped short, wearing boots and jeans and a white blouse. “Mr. Silverman. You’re a long way from Quantico.”
“Mrs. Hawk, I’m surprised you recognize me.”
“We thought you’d call or someone would come around. But here you fetch up at our door yourself. I’m more surprised than you.”
“I’m so sorry about Nick. You have my sympathy—”
She held up one hand to stop him. “I don’t talk much about that. Maybe I never will. Anyway, you haven’t traveled halfway to nowhere just to share the grief. Come on in.”
She led him through the shadowed, quiet house to the kitchen, where ledgers and receipts covered most of the dinette table.
“I’m doing the accounts, work I dearly hate. If I don’t get it done today, I’ll scream. You’ll want to talk to Ancel, but he’s at the stables with the vet. A favorite horse has come up lame.”
“Actually, Mrs. Hawk, I’d like to speak with both of you.”
She smiled. “With all these numbers fighting in my head, I’m no good for conversation. If you’ll kindly wait for Ancel on the back porch, he won’t be long. Can I get you a drink—soda, water, tea?”
Gracious though she might be, she was also wary of him.
Silverman said, “I’ll have tea if it’s not too much trouble.”
She gave him a bottle from the fridge, led him onto the porch, and left him in a rocking chair with his tea and his suspicions.
Ten minutes later, Ancel Hawk stepped out of the kitchen, onto the porch, and Silverman got up, wondering why it surprised him that the rancher was wearing a cowboy hat.
They shook hands, and Silverman asked, “How’s the horse?”
As they sat down, Ancel said, “Synovitis of the coffin joint, left front foot. Caught in time, no degeneration. Donner is a good old horse. We’ve been through some times together.”
The rancher was a big man with strong work-worn hands. Sun and wind had cured his face.
“Sweet place you have here,” Silverman said.
“Sweet it is,” Ancel agreed, “and all ours. But you didn’t come here to talk real estate.”
“I’m not here officially, either. Though it could come to that, depending. I’m concerned about Jane and wondering what she’s up to.”
Staring out at the yard and the fields beyond, giving Silverman only his profile, Ancel said, “Whatever she’s up to, it’s the right thing, and she’ll get it done. You know how she is.”
After a silence, Silverman said, “Did she leave the boy here?”
“No, sir, she did not. You’ll just have to believe me about that, but it’s true.”
“I’ve been given to understand that she’s afraid for him.”
“If she is, she’s probably right to be.”
“Why would the boy be in danger? From who
m?”
“We’re all in danger in this world, Mr. Silverman. It’s mostly not a peaceable place.”
“I can’t cover for her if she’s breaking the law, Mr. Hawk.”
“She wouldn’t want you to.”
Silverman set his half-finished bottle of tea on the porch floor beside his chair. “I’m her friend, not her enemy.”
“That well may be. I’m not in a position to know.”
“I can’t help her if I don’t know what help she needs.”
“I’m sure if she thought you could help, she’d be in touch.”
“There was an incident in California. She’s deep in something.”
“I don’t know what’s what in California. You’re ahead of me there, Mr. Silverman. Should be me tryin’ to pick your brain.”
“Texans,” Silverman said with frustration.
“You’ve had some experience of us, have you?”
“On a few occasions.”
“Then you’ve been seasoned for some disappointment here.”
Silverman got up from the chair. He went to the porch railing and stared past the yard, across the great flatness of grassland, toward a horizon as far away as if he had been at sea. He was city-born and city-raised, and these great open spaces made him uneasy. It seemed as if gravity wasn’t at full strength here, as if he and the house and anything not rooted in the earth might float up and away into the immense all-encompassing sky.
His back to Ancel Hawk, he said, “Her mother’s dead. She’s estranged from her dad. If she won’t turn to you, she has no one.”
“You better believe that troubles me and Clare. We love the girl like she was our own daughter,” the rancher said.
“Well, then?”
“She won’t come to us because she feels she’d be puttin’ us in harm’s way. That maybe isn’t the same reason she won’t come to you.”
Silverman turned his back to the daunting vista and faced his host. “Do you mean she doesn’t trust the Bureau?”
Ancel Hawk’s eyes were the clear gray of rain on weathered cedar. “Sit down a bit, why don’t you.”
Silverman returned to the rocking chair. Neither man rocked. Crickets sang in the stillness, but there was little else.
After a while, Silverman said, “You thinking about cooperating with me or what?”
“I’m thinkin’, Mr. Silverman, so let me think. Jane respects you. That’s the only reason you’re still here.”
With agitated cries, a flock of nuthatches burst out of the clear air as though flung into this world from another, swooped past the porch, and disappeared into nests and cavities in the big oak tree at the northwest corner of the house, as though taking refuge from some pending change in the weather.
Finally the rancher said, “Nick’s suicide wasn’t suicide.”
“But Jane found him, and the medical examiner—”
The rancher interrupted. “Suicide rate started climbin’ last year, now it’s up more’n twenty percent.”
“It fluctuates, like the murder rate.”
“No fluctuation. No down. Just higher every month. And these are people like our Nick, with no reason to kill themselves.”
Frowning, Silverman said, “A suicide is a suicide.”
“Not if people are somehow made to do it. Jane started lookin’ into it, diggin’ deep like she does. So they come into her home, and they promise to rape and kill Travis if she doesn’t drop it.”
Stunned to hear this paranoid conspiracy theory coming from the no-nonsense rancher, Silverman said, “They? They who?”
“Wouldn’t that be what she needs to find out?”
“Forgive me, but if I’m not suicidal, no one can make me—”
“Jane doesn’t lie except to other liars, of which I’m not one.”
“I’m not questioning your truthfulness.”
“No offense, Mr. Silverman, but I don’t care what you think of me.” The rancher got to his feet. “I’ve told you what little I can. You either look into it or you don’t.”
Getting up, Silverman said, “If you know how to reach Jane—”
“We don’t. Blunt fact is, she doesn’t trust everyone in your Bureau. Maybe you shouldn’t, either. If you folks come after me and Clare with your agents and lawyers and all the angels in Hell, it doesn’t matter. There’s no more you’ll get here. Now, I’d be obliged if you’d leave by walkin’ around the house instead of through it.”
Ancel Hawk closed the kitchen door behind him.
Going down the porch steps and rounding the house, Silverman tried to pinpoint where he’d gone wrong and lost the rancher, whose Texas grace and natural demeanor ordinarily made him polite almost to a fault. He decided that what offended Ancel Hawk was not that his own veracity had been challenged but that Silverman had seemed to question his daughter-in-law’s story. Doubt me and we can still talk, the rancher was saying, but doubt Jane and I’m done with you.
As he reached the front of the house, out of a sky as blue as moonflowers, sudden hard gusts of warm wind seemed to blow the very sunlight past him and across the pastures in bright shudders. The illusion was born of flickering shadows from the thrashing oaks and, far above, from a scrim of cirrus clouds that, lashed by higher currents, gave off a stroboscopic pulse.
Looking out across the vast land, Silverman wished that he were not in this lonely, alien place but back in Alexandria with Rishona, cities crowding all around them.
3
* * *
JANE IN A SOUTHBOUND HURRY on Interstate 405, grateful for the light traffic, had nothing now except the half of an idea that had come to her the previous night, the crazy and reckless idea based on a wild guess. She tried to put this half-assed plan in a better light by telling herself that she wasn’t really operating on a wild guess, that it was keen intuition inspired by her bear-trap memory, which didn’t let go of even the most esoteric facts once it sank its teeth into them. But she was no good at self-delusion. She couldn’t deny that she hustled now toward San Diego out of sheer desperation.
Of the things she had learned from Dr. Emily Jo Rossman, the revelation that most disturbed her was not the image of the control web across Benedetta Ashcroft’s brain, but was instead the image of it deliquescing in mere moments, leaving little evidence that it had existed, except for whatever an autopsy camera might have captured.
These days, however, when digital photographs could be easily manipulated, few people gave any credence to that old maxim Words may deceive, but photos never lie. Every form of evidence, except perhaps DNA, was now within the domain of liars. To arouse the public, an entire world of doubters would have to be present at an autopsy when the top of the skull came off and, for a minute or so, the truth of Shenneck’s implant lay revealed.
And this happened to be a bizarre age, a strange time when great numbers of people believed every manipulative junk-science claim, dreading armageddons of infinite variety, yet denied the most common-sense truths that lay luminous before them. Even if millions could be shown the control mechanism that guided Benedetta Ashcroft to kill herself, perhaps most of them would turn their faces from the truth and prefer the more comforting fear that civilization would be destroyed by an imminent invasion of extraterrestrials.
Jane had been an optimist all of her life. But after the events of the past twenty-four hours, she worried that she might be racing toward oblivion, that the only thing waiting for her in San Diego was disappointment, a blank wall into which she would take a header at high speed.
In San Juan Capistrano, before transitioning to Interstate 5, she found a Mailbox Plus store at which she purchased two large padded envelopes, a roll of tape, and a black Sharpie.
In a deserted corner of the parking lot, she slipped thirty thousand of William Overton’s cash—three bundles of hundred-dollar bills—into the first envelope and thirty thousand into the second. The envelopes were self-sealing, but she further secured the flaps with tape. With the Sharpie, she printed DORIS MCCLANE
on the first envelope, then the address. Doris was Clare’s married sister, Nick’s aunt, and lived sixteen miles from the Hawks’ ranch. Jane addressed the second envelope to Gavin and Jessica Washington; if she could trust them with her child, she could trust them with mere money.
When she had taken a considerable sum from some bad guys in New Mexico, she had sent Doris and the Washingtons a previous package of cash to stash against her future need of it. Then as now, she didn’t include a note of explanation. They would identify the sender by the fact that the return address in each case was the same as that of the recipient, and the sender’s name above it was in both instances simply Scooter, the name of a beloved dog from which Nick had been inseparable during eleven years of his childhood.
Jane returned to the mailbox store and paid to send both envelopes priority.
She had kept sixty thousand of Overton’s money for operating expenses. She hoped to God she would have some use for it.
When she had chosen to stop in San Juan Capistrano instead of in any other town, she had intended to send only one envelope, that to Doris McClane, and to hand-deliver the other thirty thousand to Gavin and Jessie, who were only an hour inland from there.
But in her current state of mind, she dared not go there. Optimist though she long had been, she was more than half convinced that this would be the last chance she would ever have to see her child, to tell him that she loved him. The urge to go to him was overwhelming. But Travis was a sensitive boy, as intuitive in his way as she was in hers. He would read her fear and know why she had come, and she would leave him more unsettled than before her visit.
She sat in her car, in the parking lot, gripping the soapstone cameo, working her thumb over the carved profile, as Travis must have done, thinking of her as she now thought about him. She didn’t cry easily, but for a while the world blurred away.