by Dean Koontz
Ramos said, “What’s wrong?”
“Nathan?” John Harrow said.
As Silverman backed between the sedan and the gate, the engine roar from the vicinity of the main house terminated in a colossal crash, the unmistakable ringing as huge sheets of glass dissolved.
As lightning pulsed behind the clouds like the lamps of some enormous vessel passing in the shroud, John Harrow stepped onto the low gate and swung over it and shouted at the nearest of Shenneck’s security guards to admit the cars. But as hard thunder chased the lightning, as Harrow sprinted up the driveway toward the main house, the two men on the porch drew pistols from under their jackets and shot him in the back.
22
* * *
JANE WITH DOUGAL, perhaps fleeing the past, perhaps hoping to redeem it, venturing into a future darker than the darkest days of history, heard the knocking of her heart and ignored it, tasted the acid of fear and swallowed it.
Across a brittleness of broken wall glass and a hard clatter of splintered chair wood, harried at gunpoint to the stairs and to the second floor, Bertold Shenneck progressed weak-limbed and shuddering, as might a dung beetle stripped of its exoskeleton. Having set out to change the world and rule it through mass murder and slavery, he had seemed to act with courage when, at enormous personal risk, he broke laws and trashed two thousand years of philosophical consensus as to the equal value of each human life. But what might have looked like courage proved to be a deficit of common sense and an excess of self-importance, too strong a faith in his genius and superiority—not courage at all, but the rash actions of an ordinary narcissist incapable of imagining that he might fail. The invasion of his house and an up-close view of a gun muzzle had been all that was required to reduce him from king lion to a quivering peasant mouse.
On the other hand, treading on glass and climbing stairs, not in the least concerned about being shot in the back, Inga Shenneck seemed unfazed by this turn of events, her faith in herself only enhanced by any setback. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, what hell you’re bringing down on yourselves. If you take this one step farther, you’re going to end up in a deep room, in a world of pain, taken apart piece by piece. This is stupid, this is idiocy, you will pay for this, you’ll beg for death. History will roll over pieces of shit like you. We are the future, we will rewrite history, and you will never have existed, useless human debris, both of you.”
On the second floor, Dougal dragged a hallway sideboard away from the wall, blocked the head of the stairs with it, and took up a position behind the furniture. The rayshaws should already have been there.
At gunpoint, Jane hurried the Shennecks onward to Bertold’s home office. There, she instructed him to sit at his desk and fire up his computer.
She pointed to a side chair and said to Inga, “Take it to the corner over there. Sit in it, face the wall, your back to the room.”
The woman’s mouth twisted in a sneer of dismissal and purest hatred that belied the impression of angelic radiance encouraged by her all-white ensemble. She gripped the chair by its head rail, her intent as evident as if she had announced it.
“You have to swing the chair to throw it,” Jane warned, “so you’ll be in Hell before it leaves your hands.”
“When you’re dead,” Inga promised, “I’ll take a long piss on your corpse.”
Jane gave her only amused contempt. “What a potty mouth. Get in the corner, Bad Barbie.”
As Inga settled in the chair, her back to the room, thunder rocked the sky once more, and peppered through the rolling sound of a storm impending, there also came a barrage of gunfire rattling in the distance. The rayshaws shooting at—whom?
23
* * *
HARROW FALLING FORWARD into a blood spray from the exit wounds in his chest, a colony of crows exploding from nearby trees with a raucous denunciation of those who would disturb their peace, black wings sculling the gray sky, Ramos and the nearest security guard drawing their weapons simultaneously, Ramos the quicker and better shot, putting a round in the mannequin face of the emotionless assassin, surviving a death-reflex near miss in return.
With the first Bureau sedan now between him and the house, Silverman saw Harrow’s killers leap from the porch and head uphill toward the main residence, as two other guards appeared around the side of the Victorian, one of them with a shotgun, the other with an Uzi machine gun.
Silverman dropped to the ground, sheltering behind the car, just as the driver, recognizing his profound vulnerability, shifted the sedan into reverse, either forgetting about the vehicle behind him or assuming the other driver would also at once speed backward out of an untenable situation. Bumpers clashed, taillights and headlights shattered. Silverman lay flat on the ground behind the first sedan as the Uzi and the shotgun opened fire. Car windows dissolved. Sheet metal shrieked as bullets tore it. Fiberglass cracked. Tires popped. Men screamed in pain but only briefly.
He found himself under the sedan without memory of having taken shelter there, his face turned toward the house. Ramos dropped into sight, part of his head gone, peering into Silverman’s refuge with rolled-back and sunken-away eyes entirely white and ghostly in their sockets, like the spirits of ancient primitives lingering in caves where they once lived in centuries past.
Although a part of the man whom he had been remained somewhere deep within him, Silverman did not join the firefight. His once-keen sense of honor no longer insisted that he act with moral authority, and his formerly acute awareness of where his loyalty should lie was now at best confused. He had seen himself in the hollow men guarding the ranch. Their hollowness was at first terrifying but then seemed darkly attractive, a spiritual abyss but also a relief from making choices and striving to do what was right. As the gunfire volleyed insanely and then diminished, he remained under the sedan. Within him, a still, small voice whispered that there was really only one thing he needed to do, that he needed only to deal with she who betrayed her country, betrayed the Bureau, betrayed him. No moral ambiguity. No complex reasoning required to assess the situation. Complete just one task, and then rest free of doubt, free of that lifelong fear that is called misgiving, free of remorse. One task. Kill her. Kill her. Kill her.
The soft drip-drip-drip and the smell of gasoline brought him out from under the sedan before a fire erupted. The silence in the bloody aftermath remained so complete that the ranch might have been a diorama mocked up and sealed in a glass box. If there had been a breeze, the crows had winged it away with them.
Then a sledgehammer of thunder walloped the day and broke the rain out of the clouds.
The driver of the front car slumped dead behind the wheel, as did the driver of the second. The two other Sacramento agents in the rear sedan had gotten out of the car alive and fast enough to take a toll on Shenneck’s security team even as they, too, were cut down. The hollow men whom Silverman had seen with a shotgun and an Uzi were now carrion waiting for the return of the birds, as was the one whom Ramos had shot. Of the six agents who arrived at Gee Zee Ranch, only Silverman survived.
The slaughter neither angered nor moved him, as once it would have. It was just a thing that happened. There could be no value in brooding about it.
He stood in the rain, waiting to know what to do next.
Fifty or sixty yards beyond the ranch gate, another security guard, on foot, hurried up the long driveway toward the main house, unaware that anyone lived in his wake. He carried what appeared to be another Uzi.
As Silverman watched the guard move out of sight into the silver sheets of rain, his phone rang. He took the call, listened, and said, “Yes, all right.”
24
* * *
A PORTION OF THE UPPER HALL was a gallery open to the living room and foyer below. Connecting the two levels, floating treads curved down with railings on both sides, allowing Dougal Trahern a clear line of sight on every approach to the stairs.
Behind the sideboard that blockaded the head of the staircase, D
ougal had two pistols and one shotgun with a three-round magazine. He thought he was well positioned and well armed, but the gunfire that had clattered up from the direction of the gatehouse concerned him. Now the rush of rain built to a vehement sibilation, as of a crowd of thousands chanting in a stage whisper, which denied him the sounds that the rayshaws might make in their approach.
Even on a gloomy afternoon, adequate light had found its way into this many-windowed residence, and there had been no lamps lit on the ground floor, other than in the kitchen. Now the storm draped the world with layers of beaded curtains, and a lurid half light seeped through the open rooms, not only obscuring things but also distorting them. Below him, for just a moment, a bell-shaded floor lamp behind a chair in the living room appeared to be a helmeted man. As corners darkled, it was easy to believe that menacing forms crouched within them, waiting to charge the stairs in force.
In fact, the rayshaws didn’t need overwhelming numbers to mount an effective assault, because they were no more fearful than would have been a regiment of deathless machines incapable of feeling pain. He didn’t yet understand that they would sacrifice themselves in a kind of samurai suicide.
It began when sheet lightning traveled the brainlike folds of the curdled clouds and pulsed through the rooms below and also down through the skylight above the stairs. Out of those pale luminous throbbings, a rayshaw appeared in the foyer as though materializing in a pentagram, a tall man with a gun. He gazed up at Dougal, who rose above the sideboard only enough to monitor activity below. The gunman moved openly toward the foot of the stairs, as if inviting a bullet, a boldness that caused Dougal to hesitate, lest the purpose might be to encourage him to rise farther and make a better target of himself for a second gunman.
25
* * *
BERTOLD SHENNECK DERAILED from the path to power, switched to a siding, his utopia having hurtled away from him on diverging tracks, lives in a moment now when genius doesn’t matter, when neither money nor connections count for anything, when science cannot save him, when he can no longer afford pride. The gun is two feet from his head. Her finger is on the trigger. She has said that if she can’t ruin him and subject him to a public shaming and imprisonment, she will kill him in such a way as to maximize his suffering. He does not doubt her sincerity. This woman is beyond his experience, as unknowable to him as would be a creature from another galaxy, but one thing he fully gets about her is that she possesses the awful power of death and is ready to use it without hesitation.
The terror that fills him now is new to him, a fright that reduces him to the condition of an animal driven by one thing—the survival instinct. As she tells him what she expects him to retrieve from his project files and copy onto the flash drives that she has brought, when with dread he considers how much time this will take, time during which the gun will be aimed at his head, he dares not conceal from her that what she wants is already available on backup files copied to flash drives and stored in a home safe. At any moment, the rayshaws will arrive, and when she realizes they will prevent her from getting what she wants, she’ll surely kill Bertold.
“It’s my life’s work,” he explains in a voice that seems too thin and shaky to be his, “so I have backup files not just here but in other secure locations.”
As he makes this revelation, Inga tries to silence him from her corner-facing chair, calling him a fool and worse.
When Inga is incensed about anything, no one exists who can produce a greater torrent of words with more passion.
But her vitriolic insistence only annoys the widow Hawk, who says, “Shut up, bitch! I don’t need you like I need him. I’d as soon blow your brains out as listen to another word.”
On occasion, Bertold has wanted to issue a variation of that threat to his bride, though the possible consequences have deterred him. Even in his terror, he takes some satisfaction from the fact that although Inga remains as restive as a rattlesnake caught in a gaffling noose, she speaks not another word.
The widow Hawk asks about the ampules containing the various kinds of command mechanisms. If she has his project files, she might as well have samples of the finished product. He says, “They’re in one of the Sub-Zeros in the kitchen, top shelf.”
Concealed behind six-foot-wide, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the safe has a voice-recognition lock that responds to two commands. As sheet lightning pulses through the day and flutters quick shadows through the room, Bertold says, “ ‘Things are as I think they are,’ ” and the shelves swing open, revealing a stainless-steel panel, after which he says, “ ‘and say they are on my blue guitar,’ ” to make the panel whisk into the ceiling.
26
* * *
STRAIGHT-FALLING RAIN drummed the roof and the skylights, a fateful funereal drone, as the rayshaw ascended fast, dodging left to right, right to left, which was the closest that he could get to a serpentine evasion on a staircase. The killer couldn’t have shot accurately while staggering upward in such a fashion; but it was odd that he didn’t shoot at all, that he came as if with no intent of conquering but with every intent of dying.
Dougal rose from behind the sideboard, fired the shotgun, the recoil knocking bone on bone in his shoulder.
The climber took the blast in the chest and abdomen. He dropped his pistol and went to his knees without a scream, not as if he had been hit, but as if he were instead a penitent seized by a sudden need to kneel and pray. At once, impossibly, he clambered to his feet, still coming although with diminished energy, staying to the inner curve of the staircase and against the railing. Maybe he wore a light bulletproof vest under his clothes, enough to spare him from most of the buckshot, or maybe he felt neither fear nor pain.
Rising higher above the sideboard, Dougal fired a second round, and the attacker was flung backward, headless, his body tumbling step to step like the straw-stuffed shape of a scarecrow wind-shorn from its crossed staves and blown to ruination.
Under cover of the first assailant, a second had raced upward, this time not bothering to attempt evasion. Staying to the outward curve of the stairs, passing the collapsing corpse, he could have squeezed off a few rounds while moving, to lend himself cover and with a greater hope of accuracy, but he held his fire.
Dougal rose higher still as the would-be killer drew near, and the third shell in the three-round magazine had such wicked impact that there was no kneeling and getting up this time, only a wild and final plummet.
Into the echo of the shotgun roar came the rattle of a fully automatic weapon. A third man, from whom the first two had meant to distract Dougal, assumed substance out of the half light in the living room, wielding an Uzi, chopping stair railing and sideboard barricade and Dougal, who dropped to the floor in a white flare of pain that bleached away the scene before him and that receded to a pinpoint of light in a great darkness, as he heard himself say his lost sister’s name, “Justine?”
27
* * *
AS JANE INSTRUCTED, the Shennecks remained in their chairs while she went to the open safe and found the clear plastic box containing the six flash drives in six labeled slots. She believed she had what she needed, because it was beyond unlikely that the scientist had labeled blank flash drives to trick her in expectation of her invasion of his home. Besides, this would-be maker of a new world, who was a man of stone and steel when planning the deaths of thousands, proved in the heat of action to have a spine of butter.
The safe also contained stacks of cash, as had Overton’s safe in Beverly Hills, plus plastic numismatic cases containing one-ounce gold coins, hundreds of them, and the recorder that stored the video taken by the house security cameras. She ignored the cash and coins, but confiscated the disc from the recorder.
She thought that the words with which Shenneck had used the voice-recognition system to open the safe must be lines of verse, but she wouldn’t give the bastard even the small satisfaction of asking. At the same time that he was a mass murderer by remote control, he was
a perpetual adolescent fond of jokes and little games, and she could imagine him preening as he explained why he’d chosen that poem and poet.
As she tucked the flash drives and the disc in a jacket pocket, a shotgun blast silenced the rain for an instant, and then another, a third, followed by the chatter of automatic weapons’ fire. Shenneck cried out in alarm, and his wife slid off her chair to huddle behind it in the corner.
Jane hurried to the hall door, which stood open. When the gunfire ceased, she crouched and looked out there, to the right, where Dougal sprawled at the head of the stairs, as still as a man who needed casketing.
She could allow herself grief in modest measure, but not yet anger. She retreated to the study, stepped to the side of the open door, her back to the wall. Fished a disposable phone from an inner jacket pocket. Entered the number she’d memorized. Pressed SEND.
Standing by at Valley Air, Ronnie Fuentes answered: “It’s me.”
Jane kept her voice low. “Bad weather.”
Another gunshot, just one this time.
“No wind. Still can do,” Ronnie said.
“He’s down.”
“All the way?”
“Don’t know.”
“Six minutes max.”
They disconnected.
She wondered if that last shot had been one of the rayshaws administering the coup de grace to Dougal.
She pocketed the phone.
Still with her back to the wall, she held the gun in two hands, muzzle toward the ceiling, waiting for what would come next.