by Dean Koontz
Like every car with a GPS, every smartphone contained a locater that issued a unique identifier, which could be satellite-tracked as easily as the phone could send and receive calls, whether it was on or off. Even if Jane had taken what she wanted from Overton’s phone and had thrown it away, there would be some value in knowing where she had been when she disposed of it.
Eleven minutes after Maurice Moomaw disconnected, he called. “The phone is on the grounds of a motel on the outskirts of Napa, California.” He gave Silverman the precise address.
12
* * *
TOWARD SHENNECK’S RANCH. The madding crowd of Los Angeles far behind, the elegant rusticness of Napa swiftly receding, Jane felt as though she were also driving out of reality—or out of reality as she’d known it—into a fantasy, into a kingdom where the acolytes of darkness ruled, unspeakable spells were cast, and the living dead served their living masters.
The two-lane county road rose through the foothills, with the fabled valley of vineyards on the left. To the right were open woods of live oaks and cork oaks and plums underlaid with golden sedge.
As they approached a single-lane dirt fire road angling off the blacktop, Dougal said, “Turn left here.”
“You’re sure?”
He rattled the sheaf of satellite photos in his lap. “I’ve got these memorized. That’s the road, all right.”
She turned onto the narrow lane. The deep tread of the Gurkha’s tires clawed up pebbles and rattled them against the undercarriage.
“It’s called the Singularity,” Dougal said.
“What is?”
“The point where human and computer intelligences will merge with the help of nanotechnology, when humans and machines combine in the next evolutionary step. There’ve been a lot of books about it.”
“Singularity. Sounds sweet.”
“They say it’ll be Utopia. They say human intelligence assisted by machine intelligence will make us a thousand times smarter. They say with nano-machines living by the thousands inside us, constantly cleaning the plaque out of our arteries and monitoring organ health and repairing damage, we’ll live for centuries, maybe forever.”
“Who are they?”
“A lot of very smart people.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Smarter than me. They’ve identified like fifteen objections to proceeding with nanotech and refuted each one. Some critics think it’s not possible, a waste of resources. Others say it’s dangerous, like if the nano-machines start replicating and consume the entire biomass of the planet in a few weeks.”
She said, “The video by Shenneck, the one with the mice, talks about non-replicating nano-machines.”
“The smart people have convincing answers to their critics.”
Jane wondered, “Those fifteen objections…does one of them say there’s a tendency to evil in human beings? Do they explain how to guarantee such powerful technology won’t be used for evil?”
“No, it’s not one of the fifteen.”
“Uh-huh.”
“They seem to think the more intelligent people are, the less evil they do.”
“Uh-huh.”
For a while, the woods became less open, trees crowding closer to one another. The overcast robbed the day of sunshine, and trees crowning the fire road wove a gloom without benefit of shadows.
Deer roamed these foothills, and she slowed down in regard for them. If an ordinary vehicle impacted a buck or even a doe at high speed, it could be totaled, but the armored Gurkha would probably plow forward, straight over the animal, with no significant damage.
Concern for the Gurkha wasn’t why she reduced speed. There were already two people dead, even if they had been venomous reptiles in human form, and surely more deaths to come, perhaps including her own. She didn’t want to have to get out of the vehicle to administer a mercy shot to a crippled deer. She had the curious conviction that such a moment would undo her emotionally as nothing else could.
Dougal said, “Another mile or so, the woods start to give way to open land, rolling hills. A mile after that, you’ll turn west.”
She glanced at him. He looked older than he was and battered and haunted, yet tough and ready and serene. She sensed in him no fear, but instead a pleasant anticipation that caused a humorless half smile, a wolfish smile, to come and go across his face.
“You really have been waiting for something like this.”
He gave her that pellucid gray call-of-the-wild stare, and she imagined that in battle he’d be brutal without being cruel, dealing swift death without hesitation, for he knew there was a profound difference between killing and murder.
“The free kitchen, after-school programs, keeping porn out of libraries—all that needs done, but it’s dealing with the aftermath, not with the causes. I’m in the mood to deal with a cause.”
13
* * *
UPON LEARNING FROM Maurice Moomaw that Overton’s stolen phone was on the grounds of a motel in Napa, Silverman had called to hire a private jet from a charter company operating out of Van Nuys Airport, which he’d used in another matter a year earlier. He might face questions about the expenditure, especially because there would be a surcharge for the last-minute booking, but if he nailed a rogue agent, cost would cease to be an issue.
Using a window-hook suction-cup beacon on the unmarked sedan and sounding the siren all but continuously, John Harrow had driven Silverman and Ramos from Beverly Hills to Van Nuys, via Santa Monica Boulevard and the Hollywood Freeway, approximately twenty-four miles through gruesome Sunday afternoon traffic, in thirty-one minutes, in spite of encountering a backup related to a three-vehicle accident.
The Citation Excel, a midsize eight-seat jet, was readied just as the three arrived, but though the co-pilot was aboard, they had to wait fourteen minutes for an on-call pilot to get there.
They were in the air just under an hour after receiving word from the NSA regarding the location of Overton’s phone.
Already, four agents out of the FBI’s Sacramento field office would be closing in on the motel to put it under surveillance.
Silverman’s job involved more management meetings and boring bureaucratic politics than street time. He was usually energized and buoyed by being out of the office and in the thick of things.
As the suburban sprawl of the San Fernando Valley fell away beneath them, however, his anxiety grew worse. Although every action he had taken thus far was what he ought to do, what he needed to do, he felt…felt as if he were not fully in control of himself, as if he must be sliding ever faster down a slippery slope. In Texas the previous day, the vastness spawned in him a sense that he might float into the all-encompassing sky. That feeling returned as the jet gained altitude. He seemed to be getting lighter by the minute. He waited for gravity to let go of him, for the jet to pierce Earth’s atmosphere and drift toward eternity, its engines no longer functioning in the vacuum of space.
“Are you all right?” John Harrow asked from his seat across the aisle.
“What? Oh. Yes. I’m fine. I just realized I forgot to call my wife this morning. And last night.”
“Better spend the flight time composing an apology,” Harrow advised. “And don’t go home without something expensive.”
“Oh, Rishona’s not like that. She’s as understanding as the day is long.”
“You’re a lucky man, Nathan.”
“As I tell myself every night and first thing every morning,” Silverman said, though his words rang hollow to his ear. He had begun to feel like a roulette player who never got the color right, whether he bet the red or the black.
14
* * *
THE FIRE ROAD ENDED, and the woods opened out to meadowed hills, as Dougal had promised. In four-wheel drive, the Gurkha tamed the territory, and a mile farther, they came to a stream, which had also been visible on the Google Earth photos. Much of the year it might be dry, but at the moment water flowed over a course of time-smoothed stones. Here,
Jane turned west and drove until Dougal told her to stop halfway up a long slope.
Together, they got out of the Gurkha and ascended on foot through a meadow carpeted with a variety of grasses and decorated with formations of chaparral lily in early bloom. Rabbits dining on sweet grass hopped away from them or sat up on their hindquarters to watch them pass. Cicadas sang, and orange butterflies with narrow dark margins on their wings took flight.
Near the top, Jane and Dougal proceeded in a crouch rather than walk erect, and then crawled onto the crest. A hundred yards below them lay the main house at Gee Zee Ranch, large and low-slung, a sweeping ultramodern structure of glass and steel, with dark-gray granite support walls polished in some places, textured in others.
Half concealed by wild grass and made small by distance, Jane and Dougal each had a pair of binoculars with nonreflective lenses that wouldn’t betray them. She surveyed the house, which she’d seen before only as roofs and extended decks on the Google Earth photos.
A long blacktop driveway led southwest from the main house to the distant county road. At the end of the private drive stood the gatehouse, the original residence before the Shennecks had bought the land: a two-story Victorian with minimal decorative millwork.
According to Overton, six rayshaws lived in the gatehouse. They did the cleaning and maintenance on the entire property, but their primary function was security. They were men who, like the girls at Aspasia, had been reduced to a lower level of consciousness, their sense of self greatly diminished, unfailingly obedient to their masters, Bertold Shenneck and his wife. Programmed.
This wasn’t a working ranch. It housed no animals; therefore, it had never been fenced. Combination heat-and-motion detectors were installed throughout the seventy acres, arrayed to sound the alarm only when an intruder was more than three feet tall and produced a body-heat signature suggesting a gross weight of a hundred pounds or more. This prevented false positives by coyotes and other creatures outside the intruder profile, though now and then deer triggered an alert that brought the heavily armed rayshaws to investigate.
Lying beside Jane on the crest, glassing the property below, Dougal said, “So the character in the novel was named Raymond Shaw.”
“In The Manchurian Candidate. Yeah. The book and the movie.”
“Haven’t read it, didn’t see it.”
“Shaw’s a prisoner of war in Korea. Brainwashed by communists, sent back to the U.S. to assassinate political figures. He doesn’t know what’s been done to him. When he’s activated, he kills—and forgets the killing.”
“So the control mechanism wires into one of these guys, strips away most memories, most of his personality, programs him to kill, and Shenneck calls him a rayshaw. What a twisted sonofabitch. He’s not just vicious and evil. He’s also an asshole.”
Remembering Overton’s defense of Shenneck for naming the ranch Gee Zee, Ground Zero, Jane said, “ ‘He likes his little jokes.’ And according to Overton, that’s Shenneck’s favorite book and movie since he was fourteen. He didn’t identify with either the hero or with Raymond Shaw. But the brainwashers really inspired him.”
15
* * *
AFTER AN HOUR in the air, the Citation Excel descended through the overcast to the Napa County Airport runway.
Silverman enjoyed no sense of relief that he was on land again. Completing the task ahead was likely to leave him feeling as empty as the pale high-altitude sky through which they had come north.
As the trail grew hot and the quarry seemed within reach, he should have felt a simmering sense of gratification, a building excitement, but he did not. He needed to find Jane Hawk, and he would. But he wouldn’t take pleasure in arresting her. Considering that the charges against her would include murder, she might resist. Once, he would have thought it impossible that she would turn a gun on him, but now he believed she might do anything. He dreaded that she might create a situation in which he would have to use violence against her, would have to shoot her, this girl who, under other circumstances, he could have loved as if she were his own daughter.
As he deplaned and walked across the tarmac with Harrow and Ramos, toward the waiting car and driver from the Sacramento field office, a cold resolve came over Silverman, a resolution that at first surprised him and that he resisted. But by the time they were in the car and being driven to the motel where Overton’s phone had been found, he resigned himself to the necessity of answering Jane’s resistance with lethal force if it came to that. She had betrayed him, after all. She had betrayed the Bureau. She had betrayed her country. If, in the penultimate moment, she chose to commit suicide by cop, he would oblige her and not be troubled by remorse. She was no longer the person he had known. She had become a stranger, a danger to society, a threat to the innocent. If it fell to him to pull the trigger and put her down, he’d do it without hesitation. This was his job. And the job had never been easy.
16
* * *
IF THE PLANET MIGHT be alive, as some believed, and if Earth might be the mother of humanity, it was a mother with a heart of ice, for the ground was cold under Jane as she lay in the grass at the crest of the hill, its glacial soil leeching the warmth from her flesh and bones. The day lay mild upon the land, winter fading into spring, yet the slaty zinc-gray clouds chilled her spirits, so that the binocular image of Shenneck’s house shivered like a mirage as tremors passed through her.
“See anything?” Dougal asked.
“No.”
Before they launched an assault, they needed to be sure that Bertold and Inga Shenneck were in the house.
Nothing moved across those seventy acres except the grass and the trees as they were stirred by a faint breeze. For long minutes, the scene might have been laid past the end of civilization, when some of humanity’s structures remained, but not humanity.
Then…a figure beyond a wall of glass. At first without convincing substance, like a shadowy shade spooking through a house forsaken by the living. Then she passed closer to the windows, in what might have been a family room, a woman in white slacks, white blouse, tall and lithe, with the in-motion posture of a model on a fashion-show runway.
“First floor, on the left,” Jane said.
“I see her,” Dougal said. “Where’s he?”
The woman disappeared behind granite…and reappeared in the kitchen.
“If she’s there,” Jane said, “maybe we assume he is, too.”
“What if we go roaring down there, and he’s not. We’ll never get a second chance.”
“I have a burner phone. I know the number at the house. If he answers, I hang up and we go in fast.”
“If she answers?”
“Then I’m Leslie Granger again, assistant to Mr. Overton’s personal assistant, Connie, and I have a question for Mr. Shenneck.”
“Either way, if they’re suspicious, it could give them a one-minute warning,” Dougal worried.
17
* * *
THE MOTEL OFFICE FEATURED racks of pamphlets enticing Napa Valley tourists to numerous attractions, most of them wineries. It looked clean and smelled clean and was well lighted, a simple but cheerful space.
Tio Barrera, the general manager, was also the front-desk clerk this shift. The sight of FBI credentials furrowed his young brow and brought forth a visible pulse in his right temple.
He provided Silverman with the motel registry, which indicated that only one guest in the past twenty-four hours had paid cash for a room. Her name was Rachel Harrington. She supposedly lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She had provided an Indiana driver’s license for ID, and the night clerk had confirmed the license number as well as the address on it. She had taken two rooms.
“Two?” John Harrow said. “Someone was traveling with her?”
“Is she still in residence?” Silverman asked, though she had paid for only one night.
Barrera checked his key drawer. “No. I’ve got two keys here for each of those rooms.”
“Som
eone was traveling with her?” Harrow repeated.
Barrera didn’t know. Phil Olney, the clerk on the graveyard shift, lived nearby. The manager summoned him with a phone call.
Olney, a retired hospital orderly who was supplementing his pension with the motel job, arrived in less than five minutes. His fringe of white hair bristled around his head as if Barrera’s phone call had given him an electric shock.
When Silverman produced a photo of Jane with shorter dark hair, Olney said, “Yeah, that’s her. Lovely lady.”
“Why two rooms?” Silverman asked.
“For her husband and the kids.”
Harrow said, “You saw the husband, the kids?”
“No. They were in the car.”
Consulting the register, Silverman said, “A Ford Explorer.”
“That’s right.”
Silverman read aloud the license-plate number she had provided. Although it was no doubt as phony as her address in Fort Wayne, Special Agent Ramos made note of it in the pocket-size spiral-bound notebook he carried.
“You see the Explorer?” Harrow asked Phil Olney.
“No, sir. But she was a nice lady, she wouldn’t lie. You could hear her choke up a little when she talked about her golden.”
“Her what?”
“Her golden retriever. Scootie. He passed away not long ago.”
Silverman asked Barrera, “Have those rooms been cleaned?”
“Yes, of course. Hours ago.”