by Dean Koontz
Bertold Shenneck watched her, walleyed.
Having deduced the meaning of Jane’s side of the telephone conversation, Inga Shenneck rose to her feet in the corner. “So you’re alone now.”
“Park your ass in that chair,” Jane whispered savagely.
Inga did as told, but facing the room rather than the corner, and with a smile as thin as the curved blade of a mezzaluna.
28
* * *
STREAMING RAIN, PROCEEDING from the trashed family room into the front of the house, as dead-eyed and grim as a forcibly drowned victim risen from a watery grave and bent on supernatural revenge, Nathan Silverman left his duty pistol holstered and instead drew the untraceable .45 Kimber from his belt. He stopped behind the man, the hollow man, who was wielding the Uzi, and just then the automatic carbine spat out its last round.
The hollow man lowered the gun and ejected the spent case and stood staring up at the head of the stairs as he fished a fresh magazine from under his jacket. He slapped it into the Uzi and chambered a first round.
Silverman shot him in the back of the head. He stepped around the gunman, leaving the Uzi on the floor. Seven bullets remained with which to finish the job that Booth Kohl—Randolph Hendrickson, Booth Hendrickson, Randolph Kohl—had given him when his phone had rung minutes earlier, as he’d stood among the dead at the front gate.
Silence settled over all, but for the restless rataplan of rain. The house seemed to be submerged and under great pressure, as if it were a submarine exceeding the maximum depth for which it had been designed. The light came watery and gray through the windows, and the shadows appeared to undulate like kelp leaves stirred by lazy currents. As Silverman climbed the stairs, the air felt thick, and thicker with each inhalation.
29
* * *
JANE IN SHENNECK’S STUDY, her back to the wall, the open door to her right. The genius at his desk with his face in his hands, like a child who believes the monster emerging from the closet will leave him untouched as long as he doesn’t look at it. Inga in the corner, watching with feral interest, mane of pale golden hair like that of some stone-temple goddess half human and half lioness.
The lightning seemed to have passed, and the thunder. But for the thudding of Jane’s heart, the only sound was the million-footed rain jittering across the roof.
From the hallway came a voice. “FBI. FBI. It’s over now. Jane? Jane Hawk? Are you here? Are you all right?”
Three thousand miles from Quantico, four months from the life of which she had been stripped, she heard Nathan Silverman and felt relief and stepped away from the wall. Then she warned herself that, in the quick of action, reason must rule over emotion, and she took back the step she’d taken, pressing against the wall once more.
Nathan appeared in the doorway and looked at her, and she had never seen him more solemn, gray-faced and tight-lipped. “They’re all dead,” he told her. “The hollow men and all the agents with me. All dead. Are you all right?”
He had a pistol with a three-inch barrel, not a traditional duty gun, and he carried it at his side, aimed at the floor. He proceeded past her into the room. “Bertold Shenneck? Inga Shenneck?”
Turning in his office chair, the scientist made the mistake of lowering his hands from his face, and Nathan killed him with one shot.
Inga bolted to her feet, kicking aside the chair that penned her in the corner, and Nathan needed two rounds to put her down.
Regardless of the desperate nature of the situation, there was no Bureau protocol that allowed for the killing of unarmed suspects.
As Jane brought up her Heckler & Koch, Nathan turned with his pistol in a two-hand grip, and they stood face-to-face, less than six feet between them.
Seven years of respect and admiration, years of friendship, restrained her finger on the trigger, though the only one of them who had a chance of surviving was the one who fired first.
The rain rushed down the day, the house resonated with it, the seconds passed, then half a minute, until both the moment and the man became too strange for her to bear.
He said, “They were not needed anymore.”
She waited for him to explain.
After a shorter silence, he said, “There are others to carry on Shenneck’s work. Others less flamboyant, more reliable.”
No doubt that he was Nathan Silverman, her section chief, the genuine article, not a doppelganger. He was the husband of Rishona, the father of a son and two daughters, as well known to Jane as anyone else in the world. But she was pressed now to the conclusion that he had sold out, gone to the dark side…unless something worse had happened to him.
“How is Jareb?” she asked, inquiring after his son.
His face remained expressionless, and he did not reply.
“How’s Chaya? Does she still like landscape architecture? She has such a talent for it.”
His eyes were as dark as the muzzle of his pistol. They were locked on her eyes in something more than a staring match.
“Lisbeth?” Jane asked. “Have she and Paul set a wedding date yet?”
His mouth moved, tried to shape itself around his thoughts, but no sound came from him, as though he might have spoken if he hadn’t known that he had come to a place where words no longer could redeem the past or shape the future. And still he searched her eyes as if he had lost something that he might find in her.
“My boy…Nick’s boy and mine, our boy is five,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady, failing in the struggle. “You remember Travis. He wants a pony. My little cowboy.”
His gun tracked away from her. Separate from the crash of the shot, she heard the whisper-whine of the bullet inches from her left ear, the crack of dry wall punctured, and she almost shot him then, restraining herself only because the miss was clearly intentional. He fired again, still inches off target and slightly higher, but then the muzzle tracked down and toward her, until that single eye, ready with the wink of death, regarded her.
Whatever he’d become, his control mechanism was of a different kind from the one that had commanded Nick to kill himself. That way out was denied to Nathan Silverman. At last his rigid face collapsed in an expression, clenched in anguish, his eyes but pools of misery, and he found a word to speak, the word a name, the name Rishona.
Something tore within Jane when she did what needed to be done, what he was asking her to do that he could not accomplish. If such a hateful thing could be an act of love, it was an act of love on her part, that she should release him from the hell of slavery, from being used to do the vicious work of men not fit to speak his name. In the instant between the motion and the act, she saw in his face the realization and relief that she would grant him what he wanted. At a terrible cost to herself, she shot him twice, and when he fell to the floor, she shot him a third time, to be certain beyond all doubt that the web spanning his brain and the weaver who crawled the web could not rule him even one moment longer.
Over her raw sounds of grief, she heard the helicopter coming.
30
* * *
AT THE HEAD OF THE STAIRS, behind the bullet-chopped sideboard, Dougal Trahern lay bleeding and unconscious, his pulse too quick and too weak, but still alive.
Jane shoved the sideboard out of the way and raced down the stairs, between the buckshot-ravaged dead, not allowing herself to consider upon what she was treading in her frantic descent.
She unlocked the front door, threw it open, and stepped outside as the helicopter cruised in low from the southwest, its rotary wing whisking the rain, wipers flinging fans of water off the advanced glass cockpit. The twin-engine medium-size craft could have carried nine passengers if the configuration of its interior had not been customized for the air-ambulance service that Valley Air contracted out to several area hospitals.
If the rain had been accompanied by stiff wind, the helo might have been grounded, although Ronnie Fuentes himself was piloting it and determined to do whatever his father’s favorite serge
ant needed. If neither Jane nor Dougal had been badly wounded in the raid, the helicopter would never have been called to the ranch. Now it landed not just with Ronnie aboard but also with his older sister, Nora, a pilot herself and a former Army medic, who was a partner in Valley Air.
Dougal was a big guy. Stabilizing him and getting him out of the house, into the helo, required Jane to assist Nora and Ronnie. If the carnage in the residence shocked the Fuentes siblings, neither gave any indication of it, maneuvering around the dead men as if around misplaced furniture.
When Dougal had been loaded aboard, as Nora tended to him, she looked out through the open door at Jane standing in the rain. “Did it all go to shit?”
“No. We did what we came to do.”
“Maybe I don’t want to know what this is about.”
“You don’t.”
“Are you okay, girl?”
“I will be. I hope to God Dougal is.”
The twin engines fired up in sequence, and the rotary wing chugged into action, and Nora closed the door.
Jane backed away to watch the helicopter lift off.
They could not take Dougal to a hospital, where he would sooner or later be connected with the bloody melee at Gee Zee Ranch. That would be putting him at risk of murder charges. Worse, he would be brought to the attention of David James Michael, the billionaire who funded Shenneck and perhaps now funded others who embraced the same mission.
From Valley Air, Dougal would be spirited to Nora’s house, where she hoped to keep him stable until the nearest discreet and trustworthy doctor, Porter Walkins, arrived by car from Santa Rosa, nearly fifty miles away. Walkins, an Army doctor who had retired from the military to a private practice, had been given both Jane’s and Dougal’s blood types; on short notice, he could obtain, without attracting notice, enough blood for a significant transfusion.
Jane stood in the rain as the air ambulance churned off the lawn and skyward, wondering how it had happened that the world had slid so far into the present darkness. So far into it that there were people like Fuentes and Porter Walkins—once trusting in the law and still hopeful of its full restoration—who recognized this new and ominous reality and who would participate in a kind of underground resistance when called upon.
As the helicopter accelerated southwest, Jane hurried back into the house.
31
* * *
IN THE LIVING ROOM, she picked up the Uzi. She checked the magazine and found it fully loaded. This was a radical weapon, but these were radical times. Although she hoped never to have a need for the gun, she kept it.
She took a decorative pillow from one of the sofas, zippered open the case, stripped out the foam core. She went up to the second floor, returning to the dead genius’s study, though she would rather have gone directly to the Gurkha and retraced the route by which she had driven to the ranch. But in this new world, you could seldom afford to do what you’d rather do instead of what you must.
She didn’t look at the three bodies, but made her way directly to the open safe, where she stuffed the empty pillowcase with banded packets of hundred-dollar bills. She threw some gold coins into the makeshift bag as well. She was in a war now, and wars were damn expensive.
Downstairs, when she stepped into the kitchen, she found that it had been invaded by coyotes.
32
* * *
COUSINS TO WOLVES, they would have been beautiful in the wild, just doglike enough to charm the eye. Prowling the kitchen, however, stepping gingerly through broken glass, they were lean and ragged in their rain-sodden coats, lantern-eyed in the storm gloom, taking inventory with their flared nostrils and lolling tongues, like revenants out of Hell unleashed for Armageddon. When they caught sight of her, their black lips skinned back from teeth that could crack bones to get the marrow, and they greeted her in voices that were half menacing growls and half purrs in anticipation of their hunger satisfied.
She dropped the decorative pillowcase and took the Uzi in two hands and squeezed off a burst well wide of the Gurkha, by intention killing just one of the coyotes, hoping they would be wise enough to recognize superior power and sufficiently frightened by gunfire to be chased out by it. In fact, they scrambled over one another—five, six, seven of them—away into the family room and out through the opening where a wall of glass had been.
When she and Dougal had sprung from the armored vehicle to confront the Shennecks, they had left the doors open. She picked up the pillowcase, walked around to the passenger’s side, put the money on the seat, and closed the door.
Out in the backyard, the coyotes sounded as if they were in ferocious combat with something, and she kept a wary eye on the archway to the family room as she went to the driver’s side of the Gurkha. When she opened the back door to stow the Uzi, she came face-to-face with a lingering beast that had earlier invaded the vehicle.
She swung the Uzi up, not to fire it but to use it as a club, and the coyote sprang at her not to attack but, in its terror, to scuffle past her and escape. The impact of the creature staggered her backward, and she heard its teeth snapping hard against the barrel of the weapon, felt its feet clawing at her coat, smelled filthy fur and pungent musk and blood-soured breath, and then it flailed off her and bounded away.
Shaken and gasping for breath, wondering if the moment had turned supernatural, if Ground Zero Ranch might be fated to be her burial ground, she wanted to get out of there fast.
But she had to locate the ampules containing the control mechanisms. They were in the second refrigerator, on the top shelf, as Shenneck had said they would be. There were sixteen large ampules slotted in a foam-lined container, each neatly labeled.
She had to keep them cold.
The furious combat in the backyard continued. Her imagination drew for her an image of the coyotes contesting with a grizzly bear, though there were no grizzlies in California anymore.
How to keep the ampules cold?
Shenneck would have had to keep them cold when he brought them here from the lab in Menlo Park. Perhaps in a Styrofoam cooler, a picnic cooler, something like that.
Alert for the return of the coyotes or for whatever they might be fighting out there, she found the cooler in the pantry and filled it with ice and nestled the ampules in it.
She put the cooler and the Uzi in the back of the Gurkha, slammed the door, swung in behind the wheel, slammed that door, started the engine, and reversed out of the kitchen. She battered the tanklike SUV through ruined furniture and drove out of the house, across the terrace, onto the yard. No grizzly bear. The coyotes were savaging one another in the rain. Two of them were feeding on one of their own that they had killed.
If the entire world had not gone mad, this piece of it, this getaway property where life was meant to be a holiday, was surely mad, with predators eating their own, nature corrupted by the people who once had lived here, just as the people themselves had been corrupted.
She drove off the lawn and into the wild grass and up the long slope to the crest where she and Dougal had studied the house with binoculars. There she braked and looked back. The coyotes had not followed her; they were in a war of all against all.
She noticed then the blood on her right hand. She had not felt the sting of the scratch. Now she did. It was about two inches long and shallow, and she could imagine only that it had been inflicted by the coyote, the flick of a scrabbling claw.
She stared at the laceration for a long, still moment. There was nothing to be done about it just yet.
It was shallow. Bleeding very little. Not a major wound.
Using the disposable phone, she called Ronnie Fuentes once more. The helicopter had landed at Valley Air. They were in Nora’s Range Rover with Dougal, just then pulling into Nora’s garage.
“Call Dr. Walkins,” Jane said. “If he hasn’t left Santa Rosa, if he’s still getting the blood for Dougal, tell him also to bring a complete course of postexposure rabies vaccine.”
“The sergeant was bitten?
By what?”
“Not Dougal. Me. And it’s just a scratch.”
After she had found her way back through the rolling meadows and open woods to a paved road, she got out and replaced the license plates that she and Dougal had removed on the way to the ranch.
The rain withered to an end as she finished the task, and the waning day came to an early twilight under the wrung-out clouds.
Entering the county road, switching on the headlights, she thought she heard a shrill wailing. When she put down her window, the sirens were piercing in the washed-clear air. She supposed she knew where they were headed, but she was not concerned, because she would be going a different way from them.
33
* * *
VALLEY AIR, ITS HANGARS and landing pads, was less busy on a Sunday than on other days, less busy on a Sunday of rain than on other Sundays, as quiet as a mausoleum in the lingering wet and deepening dark of a night such as this.
In the bathroom adjoining Ronnie Fuentes’s office, Dr. Porter Walkins watched as Jane gently but thoroughly washed the scratch on her hand. Although she had cleaned it earlier, Walkins insisted she do so again, under his direction, first with soap and water and then with povidone-iodine solution.
In a tweed sport jacket with elbow patches, a pin-striped shirt, a hand-fashioned bow tie, and pants held up with suspenders, wearing a pair of half-lens reading glasses pulled down on his nose so that he could look over them, Walkins seemed less like a doctor than like a college professor of poetry, circa 1960.
“You should be with Dougal,” she said.
“He’s stable. He’s conscious. He’ll make it. Blood loss, yes. But no evident organ damage. Nora can manage till I get back to him. Okay. Clean enough. Pat it dry.”