by Dean Koontz
15
* * *
Cora Gundersun lived in a rural area of broad rolling fields and conifer forests—Koster pines, coerulea, jack pines, Norway spruce—the meadows now blanketed with pristine snow and the trees garlanded like those on Christmas cards. The county road had been well cleared, unspooling as black as tuxedo satin through the bridal-white land.
White seemed to be the theme of the day: the landscape through which she passed, the vehicle she drove, the dress she wore, the fog that obscured her memory and veiled her intentions from her. That mental cloud did not trouble her, in fact comforted her now that her dog was safe at home and she was warm while gliding through a winter wonderland. Freedom from too much thinking was a blessing. All her life, her mind had raced as she had written reams of fiction she’d never dared submit to an agent or publisher, as she had devised new classroom techniques to reach the special-needs children who had been entrusted to her, as she had lobbied the school board to better serve girls and boys that too many people were quick to dismiss as inconvenient, a drag on society. Now she thought only of the beauty and peacefulness of the land through which she passed, of the inner voice that cared about her and promised her fulfillment.
The drive into town would take half an hour if she did not speed. And she must not speed. She had never received a ticket for speeding or for any other violation. She took quiet pride in a life lived by the corpus juris of her country during a time when the rule of law seemed everywhere under assault and corruption rampant. For a reason she did not understand—or need to understand—she knew that on this day of all days, she must drive with respect for the rules of the road and not be stopped by a patrolman.
Twenty-five minutes into her journey, the storm imprisoned in the frozen heavens suddenly broke free. From a sky invisible, a dazzling quantity of snow shimmered down. In the SUV with windows all around, Cora seemed to float through this spectacle as if the mechanics of a snow globe had been reversed, so that around her lay a worldwide winter, while she marveled at it from within a snowless sphere of glass.
The lovely inner voice encouraged her to view this snowfall as an omen. The storm could not frost her curly hair or chill her, just as the fire in her dream could not harm her. Here was an omen that confirmed the invulnerability that had been conferred upon her, absolute protection from all things hot and cold, from all things sharp and blunt, from all mortal forces.
She passed through the outskirts of town. She pulled to the curb at the head of Fitzgerald Avenue, a long and easy slope that formed a T intersection with Main Street. She picked up the butane lighter and tested it to be sure that it worked. If for any reason it failed her, there was another lighter in the glove box. It did not fail her.
16
* * *
The sky darkening and ulcerous; the Hannafin residence in its Craftsman detail now become like some cursed house in a fairy tale; the window of this vacant home glazed with the faintest phantom reflection of Jane with the cellphone to her ear…
Randall Larkin of Woodbine, Kravitz, Larkin, and Benedetto took the call from Lawrence Hannafin. “A matter of life and death? It had better be no less than that, Larry, considering that I had to put off a major client who isn’t used to being put off.”
“Your line’s secure, right?”
“Yeah, yeah. We sweep it twice a day. Are you on speakerphone?”
“Don’t sweat it. I’m alone, getting dressed. Some shit’s hit the fan. Damn if she’s catching me naked again.”
“She who?”
“I just had a visitor. The widow, the five-star bitch last seen in Napa.”
Jane thought that Larkin’s failure to respond might mean that he could not at once interpret the journalist’s description. But in fact his was a stunned silence.
Then anger and incredulity twined in his voice: “Holy shit! You’re yanking my chain. She just rang your damn doorbell?”
“I come out of the shower, there she is with a gun in my face.”
“But she can’t know.”
“She can’t,” Hannafin agreed. “She doesn’t.”
“How the hell can she know about you?”
“She doesn’t,” Hannafin repeated. “She wants to trust me. Wants me to break the story. She laid it all out.”
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. She told me to think about it, said she’ll call after I think about it, then she locked me in a closet so I couldn’t follow her, see what she was driving. I had to bust my way out. The bitch left me with a hammer and screwdriver. I’d like to get her down naked and show her another use for the damn screwdriver.”
“Don’t go off about this.”
“I’m not going off.”
“You sound like you’re going off.”
“I said I’m not. It’s an opportunity.”
“It’s an incredible opportunity,” Larkin agreed.
“I don’t think she’s a brunette anymore. She was wearing a long blond wig, which made her look the way she originally did before all this started. She’d only be wearing that if she didn’t want me to see how she’s changed the color and style of her hair so it doesn’t match either of the photos on the NCIC website.”
“What do I give a shit about her hair?” Larkin asked.
“I’m a reporter. I notice details. I’m just sayin’. Anyway, she’s going to call me at noon. Can we locate her then?”
“She’ll use a burner phone. But maybe there’s a way.”
“Tell our disc jockey she’s tied him to this. She believes I think he’s a phony.”
Jane figured disc jockey was a way of saying dee-jay, which were the first two initials of David James Michael, the charming billionaire with three first names. Perhaps the trace of acid in Hannafin’s profile of Michael had been calculated so that it would not appear as if he lived in the rich man’s pocket.
“First,” Larkin said, “I have to get our NSA guy moving fast. Noon doesn’t give us much time. I don’t know if it’s possible.”
“Suppose we put her away,” the journalist said. “Then I should be bumped up to editor sooner.”
“All things in their time.”
“Screw that. I want some gratitude.”
“I don’t have time for this now.”
“I want some gratitude, Randy.”
“Only a year, and you forget what’s already been done for you?”
“A promise is a promise, and I’ve been promised this.”
“I’m sure you’ll get the big desk. Now sit tight.”
“Count on it,” Hannafin said, and he terminated the call.
Over the journalist’s open landline came the clack of his smartphone being put down on the nightstand.
Jane could hear him moving around. He must have finished getting dressed.
They were going to make him the editor of what—the newspaper for which he wrote? If David James Michael owned any part of that publication or its parent company, his interest was deeply hidden.
So Hannafin proved to be a little piggy with his nose in D. J. Michael’s trough, one more sellout in a world of sellouts. She had not put much hope in him; but when it came to newsmen, he was the only hope she currently had.
If depression had been a viable option, she might have bought a bottle of vodka and checked into a motel under a false name and gone AWOL from this war for a few days. But her beautiful child, Travis, lived under threat of death. And her husband’s memory was stained by murder disguised as suicide. And her father, the celebrated pianist, remained out there on a successful concert tour, hoping that his long-estranged daughter, now a notorious fugitive, would be either imprisoned or shot dead before she could make him pay for what he had done to her mother nineteen years earlier. She had no time for depression. Not a minute.
Neither did she have the slightest inclination toward depression. Depression was for those despairing people who decided that life had no meaning, but Jane knew that, instead, life had too much meaning to
process, that every minute of life was rich with meaning, crammed full to the top with meaning. Some of its meaning was as clear and poignant as a needle in the neck, some of such a joyful nature that your buoyant heart seemed capable of lifting you high among the birds, although much of life’s most profound meaning lay beyond her understanding, latent and mysterious.
Standing at the window, watching the Craftsman-style house across the street, she wondered how she could best bring some meaning into the life of Lawrence Hannafin, so that the journalist might benefit from her gift, might see with clear eyes the wretched meaning of his life as he had thus far lived it, and might hope to improve himself when at last he recognized his current position in this numinous universe as worse than that of a cockroach scuttling blindly through a lightless sewer.
17
* * *
The hidden sky shedding flakes like flowerheads, petaling the day as though with a million weddings’ worth of carnations; Cora Gundersun dressed all in white, while a pleasant whiteness cosseted her mind; the bleached-white wood of long-stemmed matches bundled efficiently…
The flame from the butane lighter ignited the first cluster of blue match heads, which made a sputtering-whooshing sound as they flared into a miniature torch. She dropped the lighter and piloted the Expedition away from the curb, onto Fitzgerald Avenue once more, heading downhill toward the intersection with Main Street.
At the end of Fitzgerald, directly across Main, stood the historic Veblen Hotel, built in 1886 and renovated three times since then, most recently the previous year. The restaurant claimed half the hotel’s ground-floor street frontage and provided large windows that, at this moment, captured an enchanting view of the quaint downtown district bespangled with falling snow.
As she approached the intersection that lay one long block uphill from Main Street, Cora held the steering wheel with her left hand and with her right plucked the bunch of long-stemmed bright-burning matches from the wet florist foam. She used it to light the second bunch, and then she tossed the first little torch into the back of the Expedition, where at once it ignited some of the two hundred match heads scattered among the gasoline cans.
The sulfur smell spreading through the vehicle had not been part of her fire-walking dream; but Cora didn’t find it offensive. She thought of it as the scent of invulnerability. The still, small voice told her to breathe deeply to inoculate herself against all risk of burning, to be again the figure of wonder that inspired awe in onlookers.
In the cargo space behind her, the carpet almost at once caught fire. The thin smoke was less appealing than the sulfurous fragrance of burning matches, but of course it could do her no harm.
On the drive to town, the gasoline in the fifteen cans had been affected by the motion of the SUV, sloshing and swirling against the confining metal walls, generating heat that caused a minor expansion in volume, raising from it fumes to swell the plastic wrap that served as caps on the filler holes and spouts. Those gossamer swatches of plastic film inflated like miniature balloons, and some partly detached from the rubber bands that fixed them in place. Volatile vapors condensed on the inner surface of those inadequate prophylactics, dribbled out through tiny breaches, and slithered down the cans, not in quantity, but in the thinnest streams, perhaps no more than an ounce or two from all the containers combined.
By the time Cora entered the final block of Fitzgerald and began to accelerate toward Main, toward the historic Veblen Hotel, the hungry flames crawled up the cans and found the plastic wrap and devoured it. As she threw the second bundle of burning matches into the space behind her, she heard the whump of one of those reservoirs of gasoline taking the fire unto itself, and then another whump, but because the cans were vented in two places and because the rapidly rising temperature was not quite yet sufficient to precipitate a catastrophic expansion of the fuel, no immediate explosion ensued, only the noisy rush of flames from spout and filler hole.
The rearview mirror presented a reflection of flames churning in kaleidoscopic splendor, and Cora saw pedestrians on the sidewalk stop and point and stare, stunned that she had progressed from fire-walking to fire-driving. Their astonishment delighted her, and she laughed, not in the least alarmed by the suddenly torrid air, for she was now as she had always been—fireproof. She was both the writer and the protagonist of this amazing story, and although the air was abruptly so dry and hot that it instantly chapped her lips and cracked the lining of her nostrils, she feared not, for the lovely inner voice that encouraged her must be the voice of the God who had counseled and protected Shadrach in the furnace. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego survived the capital punishment of the king’s furnace without one singed hair, and so would she escape this test unscorched, while onlookers marveled and called out in admiration.
As the flames lapped the back of the driver’s seat and purled across the console between the front seats, as smoke seethed forward, Cora Gundersun knew one terrible moment in this otherwise triumphant procession. She glimpsed a dog on a leash, standing with its master on the sidewalk. Although it was a golden retriever rather than a long-haired dachshund, she remembered Dixie Belle at home alone, and she was pierced by an intense longing for her sweet Dixie, a longing that for a moment cleared her mind, so that she realized the horror of her situation. But with whispered reassurance, the small voice within flushed terror away with a rush of joy, and she cried out in ecstasy as flames quivered from the console onto the hem of her skirt.
When the heat blew out the window of the tailgate door, much of the smoke was sucked out through that breach, flames on the console feathering backward and brushing bright wings across Cora’s curly hair. She tramped the accelerator to the floor. With the vivacity of an indomitable heroine in this best tale that she had ever written, she issued a cry of victory as she rocketed toward the intersection.
Under a hard sky whiter than a cataracted eye, through snow cascading like a crystallized Niagara, the white Expedition cleaved the torrents. And she, in white as in the dream, wearing the only dress in which she had ever felt somewhat pretty, drove through the front wall of the hotel restaurant, great sheets of glass crashing down on the attendees of the luncheon, tables and chairs and dishes and people flung aside by her grand entrance. At last, here were the explosions releasing Cora Gundersun from this world, as the vehicle rocked to a halt, gouts of blazing gasoline vomiting through the spacious room, a threat that even the six-man security team was inadequate to address, that engulfed them and the governor, who had come to town from the capital to celebrate the reopening of this historic hotel.
18
* * *
Jane kept the disposable cellphone near at hand. The infinity transmitters in Lawrence Hannafin’s landline phones still provided her with anything that he might say while he was in the four rooms of his residence in which they were located.
In the master bathroom of the vacant house, she pulled off the blond wig, put it in a plastic bag, and returned it to her big tote. Hannafin had been right when he suspected that she was neither blond nor brunette anymore. Nor was her auburn hair straight and shaggy, but just curly enough to fool the eye into reading her face in such a way that it seemed to have a different shape from the face in the most-wanted photos on the Internet.
In her forsaken life, before she had gone on the run, she had rarely worn much makeup, hadn’t needed it; but there were times now when base and cover and eye shadow and lipstick could be a kind of mask that allowed her a sense of anonymity perhaps greater than what they actually provided. Now she decided to remain makeup-free. She kept the baseball cap and took from the tote a pair of horn-rimmed eyeglasses with plain glass lenses, a stage prop, for use when she left this place.
At the bedroom window once more, waiting to hear what Randall Larkin would reveal when he called Hannafin, she reviewed in memory the previous conversation between those men. Two things the attorney had said were of the most interest to her.
I have to get our NSA guy moving fast. Noon d
oesn’t give us much time.
NSA must be the National Security Agency. The late Bertold Shenneck’s nanomachine brain implants had been the holy grail to such a wide array of power-drunk bastards that he and David James Michael were able to weave together a conspiracy involving private-sector players and government officials who together corrupted key figures in the FBI, Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the National Security Agency. For starters. Common sense suggested that the CIA, the IRS, and perhaps every department of the government, all the way to the heights of the executive branch and the legislature, must be—if not riddled with—at least infiltrated by members of this maniacal confederacy of utopian totalitarians.
Of all the departments and agencies of the federal government concerned with law enforcement and national defense, the NSA was arguably the most secretive and powerful. Its million-square-foot Utah Data Center could winnow from the air every telephone call and text message and other digital transmission, store them, and conduct metadata analysis for evidence of terrorist activities and other threats to national security.
The NSA didn’t read the text messages or listen to the phone calls in real time, and even later reviewed only that tiny fraction of a percent flagged by an analytic scanning program. If Larkin and his ilk had a confederate at the NSA in a high enough position to assist in an effort to identify Jane’s burner-phone signal—and her location—while she was having a conversation with Lawrence Hannafin at noon, it could only mean that the rumored metropolitan-overflight program was real.
Even four years earlier, some at the Bureau had speculated that in major cities, the NSA maintained special surveillance aircraft staffed and ready to be airborne within a few minutes of receiving a go order. When flying at modest altitudes that nevertheless allowed a monitoring radius of at least fifty miles, these planes were supposedly equipped to fish from the great river of telecom signals only those carrier waves reserved for cellphones. Further, the operator on board was said to be able to customize the analytic-scanning program to search for words specific to a pending crisis—such as the names of those terrorists for whom they were searching or the name of the target against which it was thought a terror cell might be planning an imminent attack.