by Dean Koontz
Bobby checked the second video display, to his left, which was linked to Decodyne’s interior security cameras. Rasmussen thought he had over-ridden the cameras and was unobserved; but they had been watching him for the last few weeks, night after night, and recording his every treachery on videotape.
“Old Tom’s still in George Ackroyd’s office, at the VDT there.” Ackroyd was project director for Whizard. Bobby glanced at the other display, which duplicated what Rasmussen was seeing on Ackroyd’s computer screen. “He just copied the last Whizard file onto diskette.”
Rasmussen switched off the computer in Ackroyd’s office.
Simultaneously the linked VDT in front of Bobby went blank.
Bobby said, “He’s finished. He’s got it all now.”
Julie said, “The worm. He must be feeling smug.”
Bobby turned to the display on his left, leaned forward, and watched the black-and-white image of Rasmussen at Ackroyd’s terminal. “I think he’s grinning.”
“We’ll wipe that grin off his face.”
“Let’s see what he does next. Want to make a bet? Will he stay in there, finish his shift, and waltz out in the morning—or leave right now?”
“Now,” Julie said. “Or soon. He won’t risk getting caught with the floppies. He’ll leave while no one else is there.”
“No bet. I think you’re right.”
The transmitted image on the monitor flickered, rolled, but Rasmussen did not get out of Ackroyd’s chair. In fact he slumped back, as if exhausted. He yawned and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“He seems to be resting, gathering his energy,” Bobby said.
“Let’s have another tune while we wait for him to move.”
“Good idea.” He gave the CD player the start-up cue— “Begin music”—and was rewarded with Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”
On the monitor, Tom Rasmussen rose from the chair in Ackroyd’s dimly lighted office. He yawned again, stretched, and crossed the room to the big windows that looked down on Michaelson Drive, the street on which Bobby was parked.
If Bobby had slipped forward, out of the rear of the van and into the driver’s compartment, he probably would have been able to see Rasmussen standing up there at the second-floor window, silhouetted by the glow of Ackroyd’s desk lamp, staring out at the night. He stayed where he was, however, satisfied with the view on the screen.
Miller’s band was playing the famous “In the Mood” riff, again and again, gradually fading away, almost disappearing entirely but ... now blasting back at full power to repeat the entire cycle.
In Ackroyd’s office, Rasmussen finally turned from the window and looked up at the security camera that was mounted on the wall near the ceiling. He seemed to be staring straight at Bobby, as if aware of being watched. He moved a few steps closer to the camera, smiling.
Bobby said, “Music stop,” and the Miller band instantly fell silent. To Julie, he said, “Something strange here...”
“Trouble?”
Rasmussen stopped just under the security camera, still grinning up at it. From the pocket of his uniform shirt, he withdrew a folded sheet of typing paper, which he opened and held toward the lens. A message had been printed in bold black letters: GOODBYE, ASSHOLE.
“Trouble for sure,” Bobby said.
“How bad?”
“I don’t know.”
An instant later he did know: Automatic weapons fire shattered the night—he could hear the clatter even with his earphones on—and armor-piercing slugs tore through the walls of the van.
Julie evidently picked up the gunfire through her headset. “Bobby, no!”
“Get the hell out of there, babe! Run!”
Even as he spoke, Bobby tore free of the headset and dived off his chair, lying as flat against the floorboards as he could.
3
FRANK POLLARD sprinted from street to street, from alley to alley, sometimes cutting across the lawns of the dark houses. In one backyard a large black dog with yellow eyes barked and snapped at him all the way to the board fence, briefly snaring one leg of his pants as he clambered over that barrier. His heart was pounding painfully, and his throat was hot and raw because he was sucking in great drafts of the cool, dry air through his open mouth. His legs ached. As if made of iron, the flight bag pulled on his right arm, and with each lunging step that he took, pain throbbed in his wrist and shoulder socket. But he did not pause and did not glance back, because he felt as if something monstrous was at his heels, a creature that never required rest and that would turn him to stone with its gaze if he dared set eyes upon it.
In time he crossed an avenue, devoid of traffic at that late hour, and hurried along the entrance walk to another apartment complex. He went through a gate into another courtyard, this one centered by an empty swimming pool with a cracked and canted apron.
The place was lightless, but Frank’s vision had adapted to the night, and he could see well enough to avoid falling into the drained pool. He was searching for shelter. Perhaps there was a communal laundry room where he could force the lock and hide.
He had discovered something else about himself as he fled his unknown pursuer: He was thirty or forty pounds overweight and out of shape. He desperately needed to catch his breath—and think.
As he was hurrying past the doors of the ground-floor units, he realized that a couple of them were standing open, sagging on ruined hinges. Then he saw that cracks webbed some windows, holes pocked a few, and other panes were missing altogether. The grass was dead, too, as crisp as ancient paper, and the shrubbery was withered; a seared palm tree leaned at a precarious angle. The apartment complex was abandoned, awaiting a wrecking crew.
He came to a set of crumbling concrete stairs at the north end of the courtyard, glanced back. Whoever... whatever was following him was still not in sight. Gasping, he climbed to the second-floor balcony and moved from one apartment to another until he found a door ajar. It was warped: the hinges were stiff, but they worked without much noise. He slipped inside, pushing the door shut behind him.
The apartment was a well of shadows, oil-black and pooled deep. Faint ash-gray light outlined the windows but provided no illumination to the room.
He listened intently.
The silence and darkness were equal in depth.
Cautiously, Frank inched toward the nearest window, which faced the balcony and courtyard. Only a few shards of glass remained in the frame, but lots of fragments crunched and clinked under his feet. He trod carefully, both to avoid cutting a foot and to make as little noise as possible.
At the window he halted, listened again.
Stillness.
As if it was the gelid ectoplasm of a slothful ghost, a sluggish current of cold air slid inward across the few jagged points of the glass that had not already fallen from the frame.
Frank’s breath steamed in front of his face, pale ribbons of vapor in the gloom.
The silence remained unbroken for ten seconds, twenty, thirty, a full minute.
Perhaps he had escaped.
He was just about to turn away from the window when he heard footsteps outside. At the far end of the courtyard. On the walkway that led in from the street. Hard-soled shoes rang against the concrete, and each footfall echoed hollowly off the stucco walls of the surrounding buildings.
Frank stood motionless and breathed through his mouth, as if the stalker could be counted on to have the hearing of a jungle cat.
When he entered the courtyard from the entrance walkway, the stranger halted. After a long pause he began to move again; though the overlapping echoes made sounds deceptive, he seemed to be heading slowly north along the apron of the pool, toward the same stairs by which Frank, himself, had climbed to the second floor of the apartment complex.
Each deliberate, metronomic footfall was like the heavy tick of a headsman’s clock mounted on a guillotine railing, counting off the seconds until the appointed hour of the blade’s descent.
&n
bsp; 4
As IF alive, the Dodge van shrieked with every bullet that tore through its sheet-metal walls, and the wounds were inflicted not one at a time but by the score, with such relentless fury, the assault had to involve at least two machine guns. While Bobby Dakota lay flat on the floor, trying to catch God’s attention with fervent heaven-directed prayers, fragments of metal rained down on him. One of the computer screens imploded, then the other terminal, too, and all the indicator lights went out, but the interior of the van was not entirely dark; showers of amber and green and crimson and silver sparks erupted from the damaged electronic units as one steel-jacketed round after another pierced equipment housings and shattered circuit boards. Glass fell on him, too, and splinters of plastic, bits of wood, scraps of paper; the air was filled with a virtual blizzard of debris. But the noise was the worst of it; in his mind he saw himself sealed inside a great iron drum, while half a dozen big bikers, stoned on PCP, pounded on the outside of his prison with tire irons, really huge bikers with massive muscles and thick necks and coarse peltlike beards and wildly colorful Death’s-head tattoos on their arms—hell, tattoos on their face—guys as big as Thor, the Viking god, but with blazing, psychotic eyes.
Bobby had a vivid imagination. He had always thought that was one of his best qualities, one of his strengths. But he could not simply imagine his way out of this mess.
With every passing second, as slugs continued to crash into the van, he grew more astonished that he had not been hit. He was pressed to the floor, as tight as a carpet, and he tried to imagine that his body was only a quarter of an inch thick, a target with an incredibly low profile, but he still expected to get his ass shot off.
He had not anticipated the need for a gun; it wasn’t that kind of case. At least it hadn’t seemed to be that kind of case. A .38 revolver was in the van glovebox, well beyond his reach, which did not cause him a lot of frustration, actually, because a single handgun against a pair of automatic weapons was not much use.
The gunfire stopped.
After that cacophony of destruction, the silence was so profound, Bobby felt as if he had gone deaf.
The air reeked of hot metal, overheated electronic components, scorched insulation—and gasoline. Evidently the van’s tank had been punctured. The engine was still chugging, and a few sparks spat out of the shattered equipment surrounding Bobby, and his chances of escaping a flash fire were a whole lot worse than his chances of winning fifty million bucks in the state lottery.
He wanted to get the hell out of there, but if he burst out of the van, they might be waiting with machine guns to cut him down. On the other hand, if he continued to hug the floor in the darkness, counting on them to give him up for dead without checking on him, the Dodge might flare like a camp-fire primed with starter fluid, toasting him as crisp as a marshmallow.
He had no difficulty imagining himself stepping out of the van and being hit immediately by a score of bullets, jerking and twitching in a spasmodic death dance across the blacktop street, like a broken marionette jerked around on tangled strings. But he found it even easier to imagine his skin peeling off in the fire, flesh bubbling and smoking, hair whooshing up like a torch, eyes melting, teeth turning coal-black as flames seared his tongue and followed his breath down his throat to his lungs.
Sometimes a vivid imagination was definitely a curse.
Suddenly the gasoline fumes became so heavy that he had trouble drawing breath, so he started to get up.
Outside, a car horn began to blare. He heard a racing engine drawing rapidly nearer.
Someone shouted, and a machine gun opened fire again.
Bobby hit the floor, wondering what the hell was going on, but as the car with the blaring horn drew nearer, he realized what must be happening: Julie. Julie was happening. Sometimes she was like a natural force; she happened the way a storm happened, the way lightning happened, abruptly crackling down a dark sky. He had told her to get out of there, to save herself, but she had not listened to him; he wanted to kick her butt for being so bullheaded, but he loved her for it too.
5
SIDLING AWAY from the broken window, Frank tried to time his steps to those of the man in the courtyard below, with the hope that any noise he made, trodding on glass, would be covered by his unseen enemy’s advance. He figured that he was in the living room of the apartment, that it was pretty much empty except for whatever detritus had been left behind by the last tenants or had blown through the missing windows, and indeed he made it across that chamber and into a hallway in relative silence, without colliding with anything.
He hurriedly felt his way along the hall, which was as black as a predator’s lair. It smelled of mold and mildew and urine. He passed the entrance to a room, kept going, turned right through the next doorway, and shuffled to another broken window. This one had no splinters of glass left in the frame, and it did not face the courtyard but looked onto a lamplit and deserted street.
Something rustled behind him.
He turned, blinking blindly at the gloom, and almost cried out.
But the sound must have been made by a rat scurrying along the floor, close to the wall, across dry leaves or bits of paper. Just a rat.
Frank listened for footsteps, but if the stalker was still homing on him, the hollow heel clicks of his approach were completely muffled by the walls that now intervened.
He looked out the window again. The dead lawn lay below, as dry as sand and twice as brown, offering little cushion. He dropped the leather flight bag, which landed with a thud. Wincing at the prospect of the leap, he climbed onto the sill, crouching in the broken-out window, hands braced against the frame, where for a moment he hesitated.
A gust of wind ruffled his hair and coolly caressed his face. But it was a normal draft, nothing like the preternatural whiffs of wind that, earlier, had been accompanied by the unearthly and unmelodic music of a distant flute.
Suddenly, behind Frank, a blue flash pulsed out of the living room, down the hall, and through the doorway. The strange tide of light was trailed closely by an explosion and a concussion wave that shook the walls and seemed to churn the air into a more solid substance. The front door had been blasted to pieces; he heard chunks of it raining down on the floor of the apartment a couple of rooms away.
He jumped out of the window, landed on his feet. But his knees gave way, and he fell flat on the dead lawn.
At that same moment a large truck turned the corner. Its cargo bed had slat sides and a wooden tailgate. The driver smoothly shifted gears and drove past the apartment house, apparently unaware of Frank.
He scrambled to his feet, plucked the satchel off the barren lawn, and ran into the street. Having just rounded the corner, the truck was not moving fast, and Frank managed to grab the tailgate and pull himself up, one-handed, until he was standing on the rear bumper.
As the truck accelerated, Frank looked back at the decaying apartment complex. No mysterious blue light glimmered at any of the windows; they were all as black and empty as the sockets of a skull.
The truck turned right at the next corner, moving away into the sleepy night.
Exhausted, Frank clung to the tailgate. He would have been able to hold on better if he had dropped the leather flight bag, but he held fast to it because he suspected that its contents might help him to learn who he was and from where he had come and from what he was running.
6
CUT AND run! Bobby actually thought she would cut and run when trouble struck—“Get the hell out of there, babe! Run!”—would cut and run just because he told her to, as if she was an obedient little wifey, not a full-fledged partner in the agency, not a damned good investigator in her own right, just a token backup who couldn’t take the heat when the furnace kicked on. Well, to hell with that.
In her mind she could see his lovable face—merry blue eyes, pug nose, smattering of freckles, generous mouth—framed by thick honey-gold hair that was mussed (as was most often the case) like that of a small boy who
had just gotten up from a nap. She wanted to bop his pug nose just hard enough to make his blue eyes water, so he’d have no doubt how the cut-and-run suggestion annoyed her.
She had been on surveillance behind Decodyne, at the far end of the corporate parking lot, in the deep shadows under a massive Indian laurel. The moment Bobby signaled trouble, she started the Toyota’s engine. By the time she heard gunfire over the earphones, she had shifted gears, popped the emergency brake, switched on the headlights, and jammed the accelerator toward the floor.
At first she kept the headset on, calling Bobby’s name, trying to get an answer from him, hearing only the most godawful ruckus from his end. Then the set went dead; she couldn’t hear anything at all, so she pulled it off and threw it into the backseat.
Cut and run! Damn him!
When she reached the end of the last row in the parking lot, she let up on the accelerator with her right foot, simultaneously tapping the brake pedal with her left foot, finessing the small car into a slide, which carried it onto the access road that led around the big building. She turned the steering wheel into the slide, then gave the heap some gas again even before the back end had stopped skidding and shuddering. The tires barked, and the engine shrieked, and with a rattle-squeak-twang of tortured metal, the car leaped forward.
They were shooting at Bobby, and Bobby probably wasn’t even able to shoot back, because he was lax about carrying a gun on every job; he went armed only when it seemed that the current business was likely to involve violence. The Decodyne assignment had looked peaceable enough; sometimes industrial espionage could turn nasty, but the bad guy in this case was Tom Rasmussen, a computer nerd and a greedy son of a bitch, clever as a dog reading Shakespeare on a high wire, with a record of theft via computer but with no blood on his hands. He was the high-tech equivalent of a meek, embezzling bank clerk—or so he had seemed.
But Julie was armed on every job. Bobby was the optimist; she was the pessimist. Bobby expected people to act in their own best interests and be reasonable, but Julie half expected every apparently normal person to be, in secret, a crazed psychotic. A Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum was held by a clip to the back of the glovebox lid, and an Uzi—with two spare, thirty-round magazines—lay on the other front seat. From what she had heard on the earphones before they’d gone dead, she was going to need that Uzi.
The Toyota virtually flew past the side of Decodyne, and she wheeled hard left, onto Michaelson Drive, almost rising onto two wheels, almost losing control, but not quite. Ahead, Bobby’s Dodge was parked at the curb in front of the building, and another van—a dark blue Ford—was stopped in the street, doors open wide.
Two men, who had evidently been in the Ford, were standing four or five yards from the Dodge, chopping the hell out of it with automatic weapons, blasting away with such ferocity that they seemed not to be after the man inside but to have some bizarre personal grudge against the Dodge itself. They stopped firing, turned toward her as she came out of the driveway onto Michaelson, and hurriedly jammed fresh magazines into their weapons.
Ideally, she would close the hundred-yard gap between herself and the men, pull the Toyota sideways in the street, slip out, and use the car as cover to blow out the tires on their Ford and pin them down until police arrived. But she didn’t have time for all of that. They were already raising the muzzles of their weapons.
She was unnerved at how lonely the night streets looked at this hour in the heart of metropolitan Orange County, barren of traffic, washed by the urine-yellow light of the sodium-vapor streetlamps. They were in an area of banks and office buildings, no residences, no restaurants or bars within a couple of blocks. It might as well have been a city on the moon, or a vision of the world after it had been swept by an Apocalyptic disease that had left only a handful of survivors.
She didn’t have time to handle the two gunmen by the book, and she could not count on help from any quarter, so she would have to do what they least expected: play kamikaze, use her car as a weapon.
The instant she had the Toyota fully under control, she pressed the accelerator tight to the floorboards and rocketed straight at the two bastards. They opened fire, but she was already slipping down in the seat and leaning sideways a little, trying to keep her head below the dashboard and still hold the wheel relatively steady. Bullets snapped and whined off the car. The windshield burst. A second later Julie hit one of the gunmen so hard that the impact snapped her head forward, against the wheel, cutting her forehead, snapping her teeth together forcefully enough to make her jaw ache; even as pain needled through her face, she heard the body bounce off the front bumper and slam onto the hood.
With blood trickling down her forehead and dripping from her right eyebrow, Julie jabbed at the brakes and sat up at the same time. She was confronted by a man’s wide-eyed corpse jammed in the frame of the empty windshield. His face was in front of the steering wheel—teeth chipped, lips torn, chin slashed, cheek battered, left eye missing—and one of his broken legs was inside the car, hooked down over the dashboard.
Julie found the brake pedal and pumped it. With the sudden drop in speed, the dead man was dislodged. His limp body rolled across the hood, and when the car slid to a shaky halt, he vanished over the front end.
Heart racing, blinking to keep the stinging blood from blurring the vision in her right eye, Julie snatched the Uzi from the seat beside her, shoved open the door, and rolled out, moving fast and staying low.
The other gunman was already in the blue Ford van. He gave it gas before remembering to shift out of park, so the tires screamed and smoked.
Julie squeezed off two short bursts from the Uzi, blowing out both tires on her side of the van.