by Dean Koontz
“Not after this.” Barely repressed, hot tears burned his eyes red, but maybe his sweat was as cold as it was sour. Off him came a smell like salted meat gone bad.
He was too inept an actor to fake this collapse of confidence. As lamentable as a car-struck dog, he squinted up at the high, dirty windows as if no glimpse of a sun unfiltered would be his again, and then he closed his eyes and hung his head and trembled in his bonds.
Despairing, he was no good to her. She had pushed him harder than he could withstand, and now she needed to provide him with a fragile hope, fragile because he wouldn’t believe any certain promise of safe passage.
“I can give you a way out. You’re not going to be a nano king, doing whatever you want to the submissive girls of Aspasia, a world of slaves at your bidding. But there is a way to have a life.”
After a long moment, he looked up. “What way?”
“If I tell you now, if you see the path out of where you are, you’ll start playing me again. I won’t get what I need from you. The only way it works is, you tell me about D. J. Michael, and when we’re done, if I believe every word you’ve said, you get what you want.”
She opened her notebook. Clicked the ballpoint pen.
When she asked about D.J.’s Palo Alto house, Larkin answered her questions, and what he said sounded true enough.
As for the apartment in San Francisco, which occupied the entire ninth floor of a ten-story building that was owned by D.J., Larkin said, “It’s his ultimate redoubt. He feels safest there. As well he should. No one will ever get at him in that building. You try for him there, you’ll be maggot food in short order.”
When he explained what awaited any intruder in that place, Jane knew for certain that he was telling the truth, because he was not a man of sufficient imaginative power to invent such a horror.
16
* * *
Jane Hawk can’t have shot out traffic cams at every significant intersection across the county. If Jason Drucklow has to do it the hard way, he can check video archives for major area intersections like Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards, as well as those for the nearer freeway entrance ramps, looking for Randall Larkin’s S600 Mercedes, though this is a time-consuming process.
Better yet, with the back door into their system that certain people at the National Security Agency have provided him, he is able to access license-plate-recognition data that is collected by police cars and other government vehicles equipped with 360-degree plate-reading systems; the automated readings are transmitted 24/7 to a central archive. All he has to do is enter the plate number from Larkin’s S600 and specify a time block—say, from 7:00 A.M. to 8:00 A.M. If the Mercedes happens to have passed a plate reader—and most likely it will have passed more than one—he will be told the precise location and time at which the recognition occurred, whether the car was stopped or in motion, and in which direction it was headed, although its ultimate destination will remain a puzzle to be solved.
Best of all, with the license-plate number, which he already possesses, Jason is able to pull from the DMV a vehicle registration number. With that, he obtains from a cross-referenced registry the unique transponder code that allows the Mercedes to be identified from orbit by the network of satellites that serves its GPS.
Just then, Cammy Newton returns, having stopped at Jason’s favorite bakery after completing her assignment in the alleyway behind the lawyer’s office. “Carb insanity!” she declares, flipping open the lid of the bakery box and displaying both sugary morning rolls and beignets, his favorites.
“I’m about to find the Mercedes,” Jason says, as focused on the computer as any gloss-eyed granny riveted to a Vegas slot machine.
Cammy puts a morning roll on one of the napkins provided by the bakery and quietly places it on the desk, within reach of Jason’s right hand. She doesn’t at once take a pastry for herself, but sits in the other office chair and watches him with childlike adoration.
Sometimes Jason is embarrassed by the veneration with which Cammy regards him, and most of the time he is conscious of the fact that he does not deserve to be so revered, but at all times he is delighted to be the object of her hero worship.
“Long Beach,” he announces. “The car is in Long Beach, near the harbor.”
“Cool,” Cammy says.
“In a minute, I’ll have a precise location.”
“Bitchin’,” Cammy says. “You are the bomb.”
“Not really.”
“No, you are. You are the bomb.”
“Well, maybe a little bomb.”
“You are the bomb!” Cammy insists.
“Boom,” he says, and she laughs, as he knew she would.
17
* * *
Randy in the grip of revelation. As he spills what he knows about D. J. Michael to this self-righteous bitch, a new light dawns across the landscape of his mind, and an excitement builds in him that he conceals from her.
His revelation is that the confederacy of elites behind this conspiracy will fail, will be exposed and either brought to justice or slaughtered by outraged and terrified mobs who will revolt with such fury that the savage and bloody French Revolution will seem to be a genteel transition of power.
To this point, Randy has been an ardent believer in the plans of these people who call themselves Techno Arcadians, who intend to create a world of plenty and total peace through the application of total control. But he is no longer one of them. For now he sees. He sees.
He sees that Techno Arcadia will never be built, that everyone from D. J. Michael to the lowest minion involved in the scheme will face ruin and death—everyone but him. Randall Larkin will skate and live and prosper because in one morning he has been cast down from on high by, of all people, this hot-looking slut who ought to be sitting in a suite in Aspasia, waiting for the next visitor to show her what total submission means. Therefore, he has been awakened from his delusions in time to survive what fate awaits the other Techno Arcadians.
He is not nearly as rich as D.J., but he is smarter than the billionaire, smarter than any Arcadian he’s met, smarter than these smartest-of-all people. So if he could be reduced to this, so will they be, because smart isn’t enough. You’ve got to have luck, too. Luck doesn’t favor the smart. It doesn’t favor anyone. Luck can overturn the most clever plans of the smartest people. If this half-smart piece of tail, Jane Hawk, can take down the likes of Randall Walker Larkin, it is sheerest folly to suppose that total peace through total control will in fact come to pass.
He has twenty million in a super-secret account on Grand Cayman Island and the means to hire a private jet to get him to those warm climes tomorrow. On another Caribbean island, he has an estate owned by a trust that cannot be traced to him.
Not least of all, he has twelve of the new generation of nanomachine control mechanisms in a secure cold-storage facility. When D.J. is brought down hard and the conspiracy implodes, when all of the others are either in prison or dead, Randall Larkin, under the name Ormond Heimdall, can guarantee himself a life surrounded by the most loyal and submissive servants and bodyguards.
From black despair he rises now to the hope of resurrection, and he sells out D.J. to the furthest extent of which he is able.
The half-smart rat-queen bitch with her pen and notebook jots down what seems important, and before Randy finishes, he reveals one more place where D.J. sometimes goes to ground. He tells her half the truth of Iron Furnace, enough to entice her, leaving out one crucial detail. That one thing she doesn’t know might be the death of her. Although she has saved Randy by opening his eyes to the role that luck will surely play in the downfall of the Techno Arcadians, he wants her to suffer and die because, after all, she has robbed him of his dream of a world of peace, and a man’s dreams are sacred to him.
18
* * *
In the light of the screen of his second computer and the love glow of Cammy Newton, Jason scrolls the map down-county to the city of Long Beach, magn
ifies the harbor area, scans eastward, and there discovers the GPS locater of Larkin’s Mercedes. Although he has full trust in the technology, he thinks there is a mistake, for the map places the car in the Los Angeles River, south of Anaheim Street.
To verify this unlikely location, Jason returns to his primary computer, once more using the NSA’s program that allows real-time and archival study of all traffic and venue cameras installed by local, state, and federal agencies. There’s a river-watch camera associated with the Anaheim Street overpass, from which he is able to get a clear view south toward the harbor.
“Holy moly!” Cammy exclaims. “Will you look at that?”
A black Mercedes, half submerged, has shoaled up against the support structure of the bridge that carries State Highway 7 over the Los Angeles River. It bobs and wallows in the racing water. A fire-department rescue team is on the bridge, two or three vehicles, emergency beacons flashing.
19
* * *
In his crisis, Larkin did not rise to the heights of courage, nor did he display the less lofty passive courage called fortitude, nor was he able to sustain the mildest resolution to resist. When he decided to wash away his co-conspirators, he did so not with a slow and steady stream of details about D. J. Michael’s residences, but instead opened like a fire hose backed by hydrant pressure, gushing information at such a velocity and volume that Jane Hawk needed to resort to shorthand to capture useful details in her notebook.
His pale face took color from the thrill of turning traitor, cheeks flushed even in the bleaching light of the gas lantern. The fear sweat skinning his face dried up. If Jane could still read him in this state of manic surrender, Randy was buoyed from despair to relief, and his eyes shone with a kind of glee, as if he had long wanted to escape the pressure of being D. J. Michael’s consigliore and found this forced betrayal to be liberating.
When she had the information that she needed, quicker than she had expected to obtain it, she returned her pen and notebook to her handbag and got up from her chair and stared down at him not with contempt, for he was beneath contempt, and certainly not with pity. She supposed that by the most stringent code of honor, she owed him…not mercy, but perhaps clemency.
He sat there with a somewhat strained but not uncertain smile, sure that he could trust her to keep her promise. “I’m starving. That damn stuff you made me drink. I’m shaking with hunger.”
Indeed, he might be past his worst fear. He believed she would show him the path to a future, as she had said she would, for he knew that promises meant something to her, even if the promises he made to others meant nothing to him.
Turning from him, she took her handbag to the table and put it down and stood staring at the four bowls with which she’d threatened to feed the doctored water to the rats.
After a silence, he said, “What are you doing?”
The soft serpent hiss of the lantern, the white light as cold in color as vapor rising off dry ice, the gray radiance of the high windows like the sad memory of light from a First World long lost by human iniquity, the gathered darkness all around and speaking to the heart in the silent language with which darkness always spoke…
“You promised me,” Larkin said, as if to remind her that among people of honor, there were lines that could not be crossed. “You said you’d show me a path to a future.”
She picked up a full bottle of water and turned it in her hand and said, “This is the brand I bought when we lived in Virginia, when Nick was alive and we were talking about maybe a second child.”
His voice quavered. “I told you everything you needed. I’m not your enemy anymore. I’m finished. I’ve nowhere to go. All I have is you gave me your word.”
“Nick cut his throat,” she said, “cut it deep with his Ka-Bar knife, severed the carotid artery.” She turned the bottle around and around in her hand. “I found him drenched in blood.”
Behind her, Randall Larkin said, “Not the rats.”
20
* * *
Cammy attends the police-band radio, seeking some word about the situation with the river-hammered Mercedes grinding against the supports of the bridge.
At his computer, Jason leaves the real-time shot of the bridge and returns to the NSA archives. He moves to a camera upriver at the Interstate 405 overpass and reverses video, traveling back in time, alert for the moment when the swept-away S600 appears on its north-to-south journey.
Rolling her chair to Jason’s side, Cammy reports, “From what I hear, the first responders say there’s no one in the Mercedes.”
Jason is not so sure. “Unless Larkin’s body is in the trunk.”
“My man!” Cammy declares. “You are always a step ahead.”
“My job. But on second thought, I doubt she’d kidnap him and right away kill him.”
“Why not?”
“If her purpose was to kill him, she’d have done it in the alleyway behind his office.”
“There it is!” Cammy cries, pointing at the screen and then clapping her hands with delight at the sight of the riverborne Mercedes being turned and churned by currents.
Because Jason is reversing video, the black sedan rocks and wallows upriver toward the 405 bridge, which it apparently passed under earlier.
By this strategy, he moves north and further back in time, to cameras offering a river view wherever he can find them, to Del Amo Boulevard, to Highway 91, to Artesia Boulevard, Alondra Boulevard, Rosecrans Avenue. Again and again, he finds the S600 at different points on its rollicking progress.
“Call Marshall Ackerman at Volunteers for a Better Tomorrow,” Jason says, referencing the nonprofit that employs him and has some important connection with the NSA. “Tell him that Jane Hawk evidently abducted Larkin, she ditched his car in the river, and I’ll soon be able to tell him where she was when she ditched it.”
“Why would that matter?” Cammy wondered.
“Because, sugar, she might still be there with Larkin.”
21
* * *
“Not the rats,” Larkin repeated, “not the rats,” as though it was a mantra with which he could alter Jane’s intentions in much the way that a nanomachine control mechanism worked its will on the brain of one possessed.
Jane turned from the table, the bottle of water in her hand, and regarded her captive. He pulled against his bonds with such determination, straining upward with arms and legs, that it almost seemed as if he might, by sheer will, levitate and ascend out of the susurrant lantern light into the gloom overhead.
She said, “The only bottle spiked with appetite stimulant was the one you drank from. The other three are just water.”
In the lantern glow, his khaki eyes shone almost yellow, like the eyes of some feral cat. “Then you never intended…”
She put the bottle on the table. “The rats? No. But you needed to believe I would.”
From the handbag, she removed a pair of scissors. She went to him, aware that his relief stiffened into wariness at the sight of those blades.
The cutting edges were sharp, but she had to work the jaws of the scissors to saw through the stubborn zip-tie and release his left arm.
A sob of gratitude escaped Larkin as Jane dropped the scissors in his lap and said, “Free yourself.”
She stood by the table, watching him as he cut the tie that bound his left arm and then went to work on those that secured his ankles to the chair.
He gave no thought to attacking her with the scissors, but dropped them on the floor and rose shakily to his feet. He appeared cramped and fatigued, as if he had been bound much longer than was in fact the case.
Nevertheless, she drew the Colt .45 and held it at her side.
“You promised me a way out of this, a path to a life,” he said in a tone of condemnation, as if he served now as the voice of her conscience.
“You don’t need me for that. You already have a path prepared, Randy.”
“What’re you talking about?”
Fro
m an inner sport-coat pocket, Jane withdrew a passport. “A life as Ormond Heimdall.”
He reached into his suit coat, as if he could not believe the passport she held was the one he’d been carrying.
“Do you keep this with you all the time?” she wondered. “Every day, everywhere you go? Do you sleep with it close at hand? How long have you been so worried that things were going to fall apart?”
He reached for his wallet, found it missing.
“Of course I searched you before binding you to the chair. Ten C-notes in your wallet in addition to smaller bills. Your own credit cards plus, in a separate compartment, an American Express card in the name of Ormond Heimdall, which probably has a very high limit.”
22
* * *
After Cammy explained the situation to Marshall Ackerman of Volunteers for a Better Tomorrow, he said that he would prepare a crew to snatch Randall Larkin back from his kidnapper and then would stand by for a follow-up call telling him where the attorney and his captor might be found.
For long minutes, Jason was unable to locate the river-tossed Mercedes in the video archives. He went to cameras as far north as Slauson Avenue, near Bell Gardens, before he realized his error. He had stayed with the Los Angeles River channel, but the Rio Hondo, angling out of the northeast from El Monte, merged with the Los Angeles east of Downey and north of Hollydale.
He went to the junction of those two rivers and, moving back in video time, quickly found the sedan rafting down the Rio Hondo.
“You’re the bomb!” Cammy declared.
“Boom!” he said and laughed and began to track the S600 toward the point from which it had been launched on the waves.