by Dean Koontz
Now, although she could not recall what she had so recently written in her journal, the lapse of memory did not worry her, did not stir fears of the early onset of Alzheimer’s. Instead, she was inclined to listen to a still, small voice that suggested she would be depressed by the quality of what she had written, that this blank spot in her memory was nothing more than the work of the clear-eyed critic Cora Gundersun sparing the writer Cora Gundersun from the distress of acknowledging that her writing lacked polish and spirit.
She pushed the journal aside without perusing its contents.
She looked down at Dixie Belle, who sat beside the dinette chair. The dachshund gazed up at her mistress with those beautiful if mismatched eyes, pale-blue and dark-brown ovals in a gentle golden face.
Dogs in general, not just good Dixie, sometimes regarded their humans with an expression of loving concern colored with tender pity, as if they knew not merely people’s most private fears and hopes, but also the very truth of life and the fate of all things, as though they wished that they could speak in order to give comfort by sharing what they knew.
Such was the expression with which Dixie regarded Cora, and it deeply affected the woman. Sorrow without apparent cause overcame her, as did an existential dread that she knew too well. She reached down to stroke the dog’s head. When Dixie licked her hand, Cora’s vision blurred with tears.
She said, “What’s wrong with me, sweet girl? There’s something wrong with me.”
The still, small voice within told her to be calm, to worry not, to prepare herself for the eventful day ahead.
Her tears dried.
The digital clock on the oven glowed with the time—10:31 A.M.
She had an hour and a half before she must drive into town. The prospect of so much time to fill made her unaccountably nervous, as if she must keep busy in order to avoid thinking about…About what?
Her hands trembled as she opened the journal to a fresh page and picked up the pen, but the tremors passed when she began to write. As if in a trance, Cora rapidly scribed line after line of neatly formed prose, never looking back at the most recent word that she had set down, giving no thought as to what she would write next, filling time to steady her nerves.
Standing on her hind feet, forepaws on the seat of Cora’s chair, Dixie whimpered for attention.
“Be calm,” Cora told the dog. “Be calm. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Prepare yourself for the eventful day ahead.”
9
* * *
Lawrence Hannafin’s shock turned to blushing embarrassment as, naked, he snatched up the bathrobe. Wrapping it around himself and cinching the belt, he regained enough composure to be apprehensive. “Who the hell are you?”
Jane’s voice was strong but without threat. “Be cool. Sit down.”
He was accustomed to asserting himself, and his confidence quickly returned. “How did you get in here? This is breaking and entering.”
“Criminal trespass,” she corrected. She pulled back her sport coat to reveal the shoulder rig and the gun. “Sit down, Hannafin.”
After a hesitation, he warily took a step toward a second armchair that was angled to face hers.
“On the bed,” she instructed, for she didn’t want him close.
She glimpsed cold calculation in his jade-green eyes, but if he considered rushing her, he thought better of the impulse. He sat on the edge of the bed. “There’s no money in the house.”
“Do I look like a burglar?”
“I don’t know what you are.”
“But you know who I am.”
He frowned. “We’ve never met.”
She took off the baseball cap and waited.
After a moment, his eyes widened. “You’re FBI. Or were. The rogue agent everyone’s hunting. Jane Hawk.”
“What do you think of all that?” she asked.
“All what?”
“All that shit about me on TV, in the papers.”
Even in these circumstances, he fell quickly into the familiar role of inquisitive reporter. “What do you want me to think of it?”
“Do you believe it?”
“If I believed everything I see in the news, I wouldn’t be a journalist, I’d be an idiot.”
“You think I really killed two men last week? That sleazy Dark Web entrepreneur and the hotshot Beverly Hills attorney?”
“If you say you didn’t, maybe you didn’t. Convince me.”
“No, I killed them both,” she said. “To put him out of his misery, I also killed a man named Nathan Silverman, my section chief at the Bureau, a good friend and mentor, but you haven’t heard that. They don’t want that reported.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Certain people in the Bureau. In the Department of Justice. I have a story for you. A big one.”
His eyes were as unreadable as those of a jade Buddha. After a meditative silence, he said, “I’ll get a pen and a notepad, and you’ll tell me.”
“Stay put. We’ll talk awhile. Then maybe a pen and notepad.”
He hadn’t fully towel-dried his hair. Beads of water trickled down his brow, his temples. Water or sweat.
He met her stare and after another silence said, “Why me?”
“I don’t trust many journalists. The few I might have trusted in the new generation—they’re all suddenly dead. You’re not.”
“My only qualification is that I’m alive?”
“You wrote a profile of David James Michael.”
“The Silicon Valley billionaire.”
David Michael had inherited billions, none made in Silicon Valley. He subsequently made billions more from data-mining, from biotech, from just about everything in which he invested.
She said, “Your profile was fair.”
“I always try to be.”
“But there was a measure of acid in it.”
He shrugged. “He’s a philanthropist, a progressive, a down-to-earth guy, bright and charming. But I didn’t like him. I couldn’t get anything on him. There was no reason to suspect he wasn’t what he seemed to be. But a good reporter has…intuition.”
She said, “David Michael invested in a Menlo Park research facility, Shenneck Technology. Then he and Bertold Shenneck became partners in a biotech startup called Far Horizons.”
Hannafin waited for her to continue, and when she didn’t, he said, “Shenneck and his wife, Inga, died in a house fire at their Napa Valley getaway ranch on Sunday.”
“No. They were shot to death. The fire is a cover story.”
Regardless of how self-possessed he might be, every man had fear tells, like poker tells, that revealed the emotional truth of him when he was sufficiently anxious: a tic in one eye, a sudden pulse visible in the temple, a repeated licking of the lips, one thing or another. Hannafin had no tell that she could detect.
He said, “Did you kill them, too?”
“No. But they deserved to die.”
“So you’re judge and jury?”
“I can’t be bought like a judge or fooled like a jury. Anyway, Bertold Shenneck and his wife were killed because Far Horizons—meaning the bright and charming David Michael—had no further use for them.”
For a beat, he searched her eyes, as if he could read truth in the diameter of her pupils, in the blue striations of her irises. Suddenly he stood up. “Damn it, woman, I need a pen and paper.”
Jane drew the .45 from under her sport coat. “Sit down.”
He remained standing. “I can’t trust all this to memory.”
“And I can’t trust you,” she said. “Not yet. Sit down.”
Reluctantly he sat. He didn’t seem cowed by the gun. The beads of moisture tracking down his face were more likely to be water, not sweat.
“You know about my husband,” she said.
“It’s all over the news. He was a highly decorated Marine. He committed suicide about four months ago.”
“No. They murdered him.”
“Who did?”
�
�Bertold Shenneck, David James Michael, every sonofabitch associated with Far Horizons. Do you know what nanomachines are?”
The change of subject puzzled Hannafin. “Nanotechnology? Microscopic machines made of only a few molecules. Some real-world applications. Mostly science fiction.”
“Science fact,” she corrected. “Bertold Shenneck developed nanomachines that are injected into the bloodstream in a serum, hundreds of thousands of incredibly tiny constructs that are brain-tropic. They self-assemble into a larger network once they pass through capillary walls into the brain tissue.”
“Larger network?” Skepticism creased his brow, pleated the skin at the corners of his eyes. “What larger network?”
“A control mechanism.”
10
* * *
If Lawrence Hannafin thought Jane was a paranoid of the tinfoil-hat variety, he gave no indication of it. He sat on the edge of the bed, managing to look dignified in his plush cotton robe, barefoot, hands relaxed on his thighs. He listened intently.
She said, “The historical rate of suicide in the U.S. is twelve per hundred thousand. The past year or so, it’s risen to fifteen.”
“Supposing you’re right and it’s higher. So what? These are hard times for a lot of people. A bad economy, social turmoil.”
“Except the increase involves successful men and women, most in happy marriages, with no history of depression. Military…like Nick, my husband. Journalists, scientists, doctors, lawyers, police, teachers, economists. These fanatics are eliminating people their computer model says will push civilization in the wrong direction.”
“Whose computer model?”
“Shenneck’s. David Michael’s. Far Horizons’s. Whatever bastards in the government are in league with them. Their computer model.”
“Eliminating them how?”
“Are you listening to me?” she asked, her FBI cool melting a little. “Nanomachine control mechanisms. Self-assembling brain implants. They inject them—”
He interrupted. “Why would anyone submit to such an injection?”
Agitated, Jane rose from the armchair, stepped farther away from Hannafin, stood staring at him, the pistol casually aimed at the floor near his feet. “Of course they don’t know they’ve been injected. One way or another, they’re sedated first. Then they’re injected in their sleep. At conferences they attend. When they’re traveling, away from home, alone and vulnerable. The control mechanism assembles in the brain within a few hours of injection, and after that, they forget it ever happened.”
No less inscrutable than a wall of hieroglyphics in a pharaoh’s tomb, Hannafin stared at her either as if she were a prophetess predicting the very fate of humanity that he had long expected or as if she were insane and mistaking fever dreams for fact; she could not tell which. Maybe he was processing what she said, getting his mind around it. Or maybe he was thinking about the revolver in the nearby nightstand drawer, which she had found on her first visit to the house.
At last he said, “And then these people, these injected people…they’re controlled?” He couldn’t repress a note of incredulity in his voice. “You mean like robots? Like zombies?”
“It’s not that obvious,” Jane said impatiently. “They don’t know they’re controlled. But weeks later, maybe months, they receive the command to kill themselves, and they can’t resist. I can provide piles of research. Weird suicide notes. Evidence that the attorneys general of at least two states are conspiring to cover this up. I’ve spoken with a medical examiner who saw the nanomachine web across all four lobes of a brain during an autopsy.”
She had so much information to convey, and she wanted to win Hannafin’s confidence. But when she talked too fast, she was less convincing. She sounded to herself as though she was on the edge of babbling. She almost holstered the gun to reassure him, but rejected that idea. He was a big man in good physical shape. She could handle him, if it came to that, but there was no reason to give him an opening if there was a one-in-a-thousand chance he would take it.
She drew a deep breath, spoke calmly. “Their computer model identifies a critical number of Americans in each generation who supposedly could steer the culture in the wrong direction, push civilization to the brink with dangerous ideas.”
“A computer model can be designed to give any result you want.”
“No shit. But a computer model gives them self-justification. This critical number of theirs is two hundred ten thousand. They say a generation is twenty-five years. So the computer says eliminate the right eighty-four hundred each year and you’ll make a perfect world, all peace and harmony.”
“That’s freaking crazy.”
“Haven’t you noticed, insanity is the new normal?”
“Wrong ideas? What wrong ideas?”
“They aren’t specific about that. They just know them when they see them.”
“They’re going to kill people to save the world?”
“They have killed people. A lot of them. Killing to save the world—why is that hard to believe? It’s as old as history.”
Maybe he needed to be moving around to absorb a big new idea, to cope with a shock to the system. He got to his feet again, not with obvious aggressive intent, making no move for the nightstand drawer that contained the revolver. Jane eased closer to the hallway door as he moved away from her and toward the nearer of two windows. He stood staring down at the suburban street, pulling at the lower half of his face with one hand, as though he had just awakened and felt a residue of sleep still clinging like a mask.
He said, “You’re a hot item on the National Crime Information Center website. Photos. A federal warrant for your arrest. They say you’re a major national-security threat, stealing defense secrets.”
“They’re liars. You want the story of the century or not?”
“Every law-enforcement agency in the country uses the NCIC.”
“You don’t have to tell me I’m in a tight spot.”
“Nobody evades the FBI for long. Or Homeland Security. Not these days, not with cameras everywhere and drones and every car transmitting its location with a GPS.”
“I know how all that works—and how it doesn’t.”
He turned from the window to look at her. “You against the world, all to avenge your husband.”
“It’s not vengeance. It’s about clearing his name.”
“Would you know the difference? And there’s a child in this. Your son. Travis, is it? What is he—five? I’m not going to be twisted up in anything that puts a little kid at risk.”
“He’s at risk now, Hannafin. When I wouldn’t stop investigating Nick’s death and these suicides, the creeps threatened to kill Travis. Rape him and kill him. So I went on the run with him.”
“He’s safe?”
“He’s safe for now. He’s in good hands. But to make him safe forever, I’ve got to break this conspiracy wide open. I have the evidence. Thumb drives of Shenneck’s files, every iteration of his design for the brain implants, the control mechanisms. Records of his experiments. Ampules containing mechanisms ready for injection. But I don’t know who to trust in the Bureau, the police, anywhere. I need you to break the story. I have proof. But I don’t dare share it with people who might take it away from me and destroy it.”
“You’re a fugitive from justice. If I work with you instead of turning you in, I’m an accessory.”
“You’ve got a journalistic exemption.”
“Not if they won’t grant it to me and not if all this you’re telling me is a lie. Not if you aren’t real.”
Exasperation brought heat to her face and a new roughness to her voice. “They don’t just use the nanoimplants to cull the population of people they don’t like. They have other uses that’ll sicken you when I lay it all out. Terrify and sicken. This is about freedom, Hannafin, yours as much as mine. It’s about a future of hope or slavery.”
He shifted his attention from her to the street beyond the window and stood in silence.
She said, “I thought I saw a pair of balls when you stepped out of the shower. Maybe they’re just decoration.”
His hands were fisted at his sides, which might have indicated that he was repressing his anger and wanted to strike her—or that he was frustrated with his inability to be the fearless journalist that he had been in his youth.
From a sleeve on her shoulder holster, she extracted a sound suppressor and screwed it onto the pistol. “Get away from the window.” When he didn’t move, she said, “Now,” and took the Colt in a two-hand grip.
Her stance and the silencer persuaded him to move.
“Get in the closet,” she said.
His flushed face paled. “What do you mean?”
“Relax. I’m just going to give you time to think.”
“You’re going to kill me.”
“Don’t be stupid. I’ll lock you in the closet and let you think about what I’ve said.”
Before he had showered, he had left his wallet and house keys on the nightstand. Now the key, on a kinky red-plastic coil, was in the closet lock.
Hannafin hesitated to cross that threshold.
“There’s really no choice,” she said. “Go to the back of the closet and sit on the floor.”
“How long will you keep me in there?”
“Find the hammer and screwdriver I hid earlier. Use them to get the pivot pins out of the hinge barrels, pry the door open. You’ll be free in maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. I’m not about to let you watch me leave the house and see what car I’m driving.”
Relieved that the closet wouldn’t be his coffin, Hannafin stepped inside, sat on the floor. “There’s really a hammer and screwdriver?”
“Really. I’m sorry I had to come at you this way. But I’m running on a tightrope these days, and damn if anyone’s going to knock me off. It’s a quarter till nine. I’ll call you at noon. I hope you’ll decide to help me. But if you’re not ready to break a story that’ll bring the demon legions down on you, tell me so and stay out of it. I don’t want to tie myself to someone who can’t go the distance.”