The Whispering Room

by Dean Koontz

  “Did she meet a man at this conference?”

  “She met one or two she liked, but no one who, as she put it, made her want to do cartwheels.”

  “But you said something happened to her at that place.”

  Hazel stopped working with the window and seemed to be studying the flow of form and color in the finished part of the composition, though it was the glass of memory through which she was peering. “I can’t explain easily, Luther, but Cora was different after Iron Furnace Lake. Quieter. Less likely to laugh at silly things. I mean, the absurd things in life we all experience. She was enthusiastic about the conference when she first returned from it…but it was a gauzy kind of talk, few specific details, which wasn’t a bit like Cora. She had a keen eye for details. When she told you about something interesting that happened, it was always a colorful story. But after a day or so, she didn’t say another word about Kentucky. The few times I brought it up, she waved away the subject, as if it had been a lovely place, yes, but otherwise a disappointment.”

  “Maybe she did meet a man there,” Luther said, “someone she thought was special, and one way or another he hurt her.”

  “Yes, I wondered. But I don’t think that was it.”

  She left the worktable and went to a window and gazed out at her mantled backyard and a grove of spruce, their glaucous needles flocked with snow and ornamented with small cylindrical cones.

  After decades of police work, Luther knew when a witness wanted to say something more but felt constrained by loyalty to a friend or by shame, or by any of the emotions and doubts that tie knots in the tongue. Techniques of interrogation failed more often than not to pry open the shell for this last pearl, and it was better to let the troubled person negotiate with her sense of what was ethical.

  Without turning to face him, Hazel said, “After she came back from Kentucky, there were a few times I visited Cora and found her sitting almost in a trance, lost in thought. Her expression…well, I can only call it haunted. I had to speak to her two or three times before she became aware of me. I felt there might be something she was afraid of but that she didn’t want to talk about.”

  A spider spinning a web inside her skull, Luther thought, and laying eggs in the folds of her brain.

  After another silence, Hazel said, “I should have pressed her about it. Should have been more concerned. More of a friend.”

  “You don’t have one iota of responsibility for what happened at the Veblen Hotel.”

  Hazel turned to face him. “I know I don’t, Luther. I know. And yet, damned if I don’t feel that I do.”

  13

  * * *

  Jane returned to her chair and pulled it closer to Randall Larkin and moved her purse beside the chair and sat so that their knees were almost touching. She smiled warmly and leaned forward and patted the attorney’s left hand reassuringly. “How’re you doing, skipper?”

  He didn’t know what to make of her. He had arrived at an inner crossroads, a bewildering intersection of rage and fear and guilt and confusion, with waning hope that he knew how to navigate from here to any kind of safety. He sat mute, without a plea, a line, a lie that seemed likely to work.

  “You okay?” she asked again. “We have a way to go yet. I need you to be with me here. What we need now is clear thinking, Randy. No more of the old way, no more pretense of ignorance, no evasion, no manipulation.”

  Although he could imagine ways that she might have learned about Aspasia, he was obviously rattled to have been nailed for being involved in the murder of Sakura Hannafin. Evidently he didn’t recall a most important thing he’d said to Lawrence Hannafin in the first of their phone conversations to which Jane had listened. When the journalist pressed to be elevated to editor of the newspaper, when he insisted he was owed some gratitude, Larkin had replied, Only a year, and you forget what’s already been done for you?

  Sakura had been dead for a year.

  To Larkin, Jane was now more than just his tormentor, more than merely an adversary to be deceived with words or eliminated with the violence about which he had no compunction. In his confusion and helplessness, she had begun to seem to a degree magical, her sources and ways mysterious. When you were dealing with a magical creature, you could not know what trick might be played next, what spell cast, what conjuration called forth for what terrifying purpose.

  She said, “Officially, the firm that represents David James Michael, for both his business and personal legal issues, is in New York. You know the name of the firm?”

  He hesitated, wondering what razor blade might be hidden in that innocent question, calculating, his eyes heavily lidded like those of some ancient tribe’s crocodile god. At last he said, “Forsythe, Hammersmith, Aimes, and Carroway.”

  “Very good. Excellent.” She didn’t know for sure that the next thing she was about to say was true, but she was capable of adding numbers greater than two plus two. “If this conspiracy of yours was anything as clean and rational as the mafia, you would be known as D. J. Michael’s secret consigliere, the man he really turns to for legal advice in the most crucial matters.”

  “We’re not some damn spaghetti-and-meatball crew,” Larkin said, actually capable of snobbery even in these circumstances.

  “Yes, I am aware of that. Yours is an alliance of civic-minded power brokers and dazzling intellectuals unequaled in history.”

  “You mock it because you can’t understand it.”

  “Whether I understand it or not, you’ve just confirmed you’re the equivalent of D.J.’s secret consigliere.”

  He opened his mouth to object, recalled his prideful spaghetti-and-meatballs remark, and decided to concede the point.

  “I want you to tell me where and how I have the best chance of getting at D.J., past his security.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I want to know the weak points in his defenses.”

  “There are none.”

  “There always are.”

  “Not with him.”

  “When you think about it, you’ll see I’m right.”

  She lifted her handbag onto her lap and removed a Taser, not the model that fired a dart on a wire, but one requiring the user to be within arm’s reach of the target. “Know what this is, Randy?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  Being tough. Being cool. Not deigning to look at the device, unimpressed with the threat.

  “My first thought was to work you over with this. I even have two sets of spare batteries. You pump iron in your home gym. You have a personal trainer. You’re fit, but at the core you’re soft. You haven’t known much pain in your pampered life. A hundred or so zaps with this, I figure you’ll tell me anything I want to know rather than take another hundred.”

  “So try me.”

  “I might yet.” She returned the Taser to the handbag. “But if possible, I’d like to spare myself the role of torturer.”

  He straightened a little in his chair and lifted his chin, unaware that in repressing a smile of satisfaction, he had smoothed his face into a blandness so inappropriate to the moment that it was a de facto smirk. He thought she had admitted to having ethics that limited what actions she might take.

  “No, not that,” she said, as though she could read his mind. “I want to spare myself the tedium of torture. You will resist, if only to prove that you’ve got at least a marginal spine. You’ll resist, and you’ll pass out, and I’ll have to revive you, and you’ll pass out again. You’ll vomit and piss your pants. I’d prefer to avoid the messy intimacy of torture, considering that you disgust me.”

  Not even a faint smile now.

  From her handbag she extracted a small Ziploc bag and showed him that it contained a frankfurter cut into four pieces. She opened the bag and threw the chunks of meat deeper into the factory, into different places in the gloom where paperwork had been discarded in mounds.

  After a wary silence, rustling suddenly arose out there in the pestilential darkness, and the thin squeaks of co
ntestants engaged in territorial disputes, the eager busyness characterizing a species that never quite satisfied its hunger. Disturbed by scrambling feet, nests and warren ways gave forth again transient odors of urine and mold and rodent musk.

  “The place is infested with them. Nobody’s disturbed them in years. Maybe they no longer know they should be afraid of people.”

  He turned his head to search the darkness.

  As the activity declined, Jane leaned forward and tapped the cable tie on Larkin’s left wrist. “The way this is designed, it can be pulled tighter, but it can’t be loosened. It’s very hard, very break-resistant plastic. You need to cut it off, and you don’t have anything to cut with.”

  He found the will to remain expressionless.

  From her handbag, she extracted a fat roll of gauze. “A gag to shove in your mouth.” She produced a roll of duct tape. “To wind around your head a few times to secure the gag.” She returned them to the handbag. “You see the dog bowls on the table?”

  His gaze went to the bowls.

  “I’ll put them on the floor near the places where they’re nesting in all the trash. The four bottles of water are for the bowls. To get a drink, the poor things have to scurry all the way down into the basement, where water collects after a rain. But it’s nasty, dirty, stagnant water. They’ll like a taste of something fresh. But it’s not just water.”

  Larkin’s attention had shifted to her. His body, his face, his khaki-brown eyes were as steady as if time had stopped, as if he sat now as part of a tableau on which the laws of physics no longer had any effect in a stilled universe.

  “It’s water spiked with a concentration of an over-the-counter appetite stimulant that used to be available by prescription only. Cancer patients and others, with no desire to eat, find it highly effective. When the pharmaceutical company was developing this stuff, they tested it on lab rats. The little guys were positively ravenous. It takes two hours after they have a drink, especially at the concentration I’ve provided. That’ll be an interesting two hours for you, shouldn’t be a boring moment in it.”

  Had the day been hot, there would have been some doubt; but the day was mild, the factory cool, and the emergence of a thousand tiny droplets across the width of Larkin’s paste-pale brow could have but one interpretation.

  He arrived at the only conclusion that he could allow himself. “You’d never do it. You never would. Not this. It’s…it’s inhuman.”

  Jane was surprised by her own laughter, genuine but so dark that it disturbed her. “Oh, honey, you really are quite a prize. You people strip away the minds of innocent girls, their memories and hopes, and you program them for hideous serial abuse. You turn those with whom you don’t agree into suicide machines, based on some idiot computer model. You threaten to rape and kill five-year-old boys, my five-year-old boy. And you think you have the right to judge me inhuman?”

  She half rose from her chair and leaned over him. He tried to pull away, sure that she had violence in mind. But she only pinched his cheek, not hard, but as if with perverse affection.

  “Randy, I can’t even begin to compete with you in a game of inhumanity. You have so much to teach and nothing to learn about the subject.”

  She sat once more and wiped her eyes, as if the tears were those of only laughter.

  The Coleman lantern hissed softly, and tiny muffled voices spoke of an unexpected banquet, their wordless sounds as thin as the creaking floorboards under the weight of a stalker in a dream.

  Leaning toward Larkin, she said, “I’ve been on the run more than two months. I’m on the most-wanted list of every police agency in the country. I couldn’t begin to count the number of people who would shoot me on sight if they had the chance. I’m as desperate as desperate gets, Randy. If you don’t tell me how I can get to David James Michael and take him down, I’ll leave you to the rats and know that the only person who’d disapprove would be the Devil himself, because he wants you alive to do his work.”

  14

  * * *

  Jason Drucklow through a back door into the nearly infinite vaults of the NSA, a chambered sea flooded with archived phone calls and text messages and emails and video from uncounted sources. Like a scuba diver, swimming down through murky strata, past coral reefs of secrets big and small, a treasure of submerged wonders to be explored, perhaps the very truth of creation waiting below in one watery abyss or another, though at the moment seeking only ordinary traffic-cam video…

  The first of the two pertinent street cameras, beyond the east end of the alleyway, which should have captured Larkin arriving at his office building, is apparently malfunctioning. It currently offers no real-time image of Beverly Hills in all its legendary elegance, only a blank screen.

  When Jason sources the archived video, he first specifies 7:00 A.M. of this same day. And then 6:30. And then 6:00. But the camera continues to offer nothing. Only when he jumps all the way to 5:00 A.M. is he rewarded with a view of the street from north to south.

  Dawn still perhaps an hour in the future. The lamplit avenue quiet in the last of the night. A street-sweeping truck swirling out a thin low sluice of water, whirling it away with whatever dead leaves and litter. A delivery van headed south to north. A police car on patrol from north to south.

  Jason fast-forwards to the sudden appearance of a pedestrian at 5:11, when a flare of light is followed by a blank screen. He scans backward to the moment when the figure emerges from the mouth of the alley, then plays the video at normal speed.

  Lamplight offers far less clarity than the sun, but Jason is certain this is a woman who approaches. She raises both arms, and only at the muzzle flash does he realize she holds a firearm in a two-hand grip. The screen goes blank the instant after the flash. She’s a superb marksman. Jason keeps up with current events, and he realizes who she must be.

  He sources the traffic cam on the avenue past the west end of the alley and soon discovers that she blew out this camera—again with one shot—less than three minutes before she wrecked the one on the parallel street to the east. The light this time is marginally better, and the extreme length of the pistol barrel suggests it is fitted with a sound suppressor.

  There will be no video of Randall Larkin arriving at the east end of the alleyway in his Mercedes or leaving at the west end. The likelihood is that he was kidnapped and driven away by Jane Hawk.

  Jason is excited that a chase is on, the woman on the run and the hunter in pursuit from the comfort of his apartment. He has no doubt that he will find the Mercedes soon, the kidnapper and the kidnapped soon thereafter.

  15

  * * *

  As if it were a magical elixir, the water glimmered with gas-lantern light, and the facets of the plastic bottles shone as crisp as beveled crystal.

  Jane picked up one of the four bottles from the makeshift table and took it to Randall Larkin in his patio chair. Twisting off the cap, she said, “I want you to drink half of this.”

  The ghastly aspect of his fear-fevered eyes, his pallor, and his sheen of sweat proved well enough that he no longer believed in his invincibility, but he couldn’t give up the pretense that he remained one of a sovereign class above all harm. With feigned indifference, he said, “I’m not thirsty.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “I won’t drink it. There’s that stuff in it.”

  “That’s exactly why you will drink it, Randy. I want you to feel the effectiveness of this appetite stimulant in such a high concentration, so you’ll know how crazy hungry the rats will be.”

  “You can’t make me.”

  “Don’t be pathetic. Here’s your choice. You be nice and drink half a bottle when I hold it for you. Or I zap you with the Taser, you cry out, I jam the bottle in your open mouth and clamp your jaw shut and pour it straight down, so you either have to swallow fast or drown. Your situation is already unpleasant, counselor. Why make it worse?”

  She held the bottle for him, pouring slowly, and
he swallowed rhythmically. Half the contents made it down his throat, merely a dribble or two wetting his chin. She capped the bottle and put it with the other three.

  Once more in her chair, knees almost touching Larkin’s knees, this intimacy unnerving him, Jane said, “D. J. Michael owns an estate in Palo Alto, an apartment in San Francisco, a three-acre estate on Lake Tahoe in Nevada, another apartment in New York, maybe more homes I don’t know about. I want you to tell me certain particulars of each place, the layout, the way the security works. I have a list.”

  “There’s no way you can get at him.”

  “I don’t expect you to tell me where you think there might be vulnerabilities. You won’t know, anyway. Knowing these things isn’t who you are. It’s who I am. Tell me enough, and I’ll see where the holes in the fence are.”

  While Jane took a notebook and pen from her handbag, Larkin at last climbed down fast from his imagined throne on Olympus, pulling about himself a beggar’s cloak of self-pity, eyes misting with grief for his lost status. “I tell you or I don’t tell you, I’m dead.”

  “You’re right about the second choice. But when this is over, you go back and lie about what you told me. You were a hero, right? You gave me nothing but misinformation. And then you escaped.”

  He shivered now, though the factory was actually warmer than it had first been. “You don’t know these people. These people are out to change the world, with them higher at the top of the heap than anyone has ever been or dreamed of being. With so much at risk—everything!—they’ll pop me, plant me, and piss on my grave.” Spittle flew with each plosive. “They know how you are, and they know me, and that’s the end of trust. I’ll be garbage to them now. These people don’t know from mercy.”

  “ ‘These people’? Randy, listen to yourself. You are one of these people.”