by Dean Koontz
23
* * *
“Just give me the passport, the wallet, they’re mine,” Randall Larkin wheedled. “Okay? Just give me them. Haven’t you tormented me enough already? What’s the point of this?”
Beyond this thing that called itself a man, high in the farther darkness, the west windows received less light than the east windows behind Jane, paired like the eyes of some jury of colossal presences whose pale, blank gaze attested to the moral blindness of justice on the earth.
“Anyway,” Larkin said, “you’ve won. You didn’t have to come after me. You don’t have to go after D.J. You have those flash drives with all of Bertold Shenneck’s research, the history of the control mechanisms. Dump it on the Internet, blow it all wide open in a day.”
“Most people don’t understand,” she said, “but I do, and I’m sure you do.”
“Understand what?”
“Laws that seemed to be about making the Internet more fair, making it more democratic and open…Woven through them are levers with which government agencies can control what’s seen. They can identify impermissible information even as it’s being uploaded, begin editing it during its initial distribution, before it’s drawn any attention. And not just edit, but also insert misinformation to discredit the whole package. They. Your people salted everywhere.”
Larkin didn’t deny her allegation, sought only to assure her that their filters were not as efficient as she supposed. “It’s not that easy. We can’t respond that fast. You’ve got Shenneck’s flash drives. You don’t need me.”
“Your people in all these agencies,” she continued, “have installed tripwires throughout the entire Web. When the name Bertold Shenneck appears in the context of words like control and mechanism and slavery, when the name Aspasia appears in relation to words like submissive and phrases like incapable of disobedience, alarms will go off, suppression of the information will begin within minutes.”
She put the passport on the table, and his gaze fastened on it.
“The days of the Wild West Internet are over,” she said. “If something appears on the Web, no matter how damaging it seems to be to those in power, they want it there for one purpose or another. Because they’ve tampered with it, can pop it, deflate it, whenever it suits them. Because it intimidates their enemies. Whatever.”
Larkin looked up from the passport. “There are a whole lot fewer Arcadians than there are other people in all those agencies. We…they aren’t all-powerful.”
From the handbag on the table, she took his wallet and placed it with the passport.
She said, “I see, Mr. Heimdall, that you’re a citizen of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. Once in the Caribbean, you’re a stone’s throw from the British West Indies. So you must have quite a stash in a secret account on Grand Cayman.”
“I don’t have anything more to give you. What more do you want from me? There is no more.”
“You can’t be Randall Larkin any longer. Your own kind will gut you. If you can’t be Ormond Heimdall, who could you be?”
“I don’t have another life set up. Only that one.”
“If you can’t be Ormond Heimdall, who could you be?”
“Nobody. Is that what you want me to say? Nobody.”
“What if you don’t have the thousand in your wallet, credit cards, millions in a bank on Grand Cayman, then what do you have?”
“Nothing. You just want to hear me say it. I’d have nothing.”
“If you had nothing, what would you be?”
His horror was equal to his anger, his anger equal to his fear, and only those three emotions in him, as he stood there like some failed prototype of a human being made from clay lacking essential ingredients.
“What would you be?” she repeated.
He considered the pistol in her hand, at her side, and then he met her eyes again. “Nothing.”
“Without money and power, you don’t know how to be anything.”
“You enjoy breaking men. Grinding them to dust.”
“Not all men,” she said. “Not most. Just the likes of you.”
24
* * *
Jason finds video shot upriver from where the Mercedes was launched down a long embankment and over the channel wall.
“Call Ackerman,” he says as Cammy Newton thrills to the sight of the luxury sedan airborne as in some chase movie.
He makes note of the coordinates of the camera and estimates the distance from there to the place where the car shot into sight through what might have been a chain-link fence. Even at a distance, he sees an industrial building that might be related to the fence, a structure perhaps twice as tall as others in the neighborhood.
Not two minutes later, Cammy has Marshall Ackerman on the line again from Volunteers for a Better Tomorrow, waiting for Jason as he continues his quest through Google Earth.
He finds what might be the building, resolves the satellite image to maximum magnification, and after a quick study, shifts to Google Street View. He does a three-sixty to discover a place zoned for industry that has fled to other states or countries, sprung and cratered pavement, the grim site of a slow cataclysm, rust and rot.
“I think this is it,” he says.
“He thinks this is it,” Cammy tells Marshall Ackerman.
Jason recites an address, and Cammy repeats it to Ackerman, and Ackerman hangs up, no doubt at once joining men who wait, heavily armed and eager, in vehicles with the engines running.
Jason snares a beignet from the bakery box, Cammy snatches up a morning roll, and they toast each other, bumping pastries together.
“Sweet!” she declares.
25
* * *
Larkin knew not what to do, standing in the lantern glow, pale and expensively disheveled, like some king in ancient times, no longer of the flesh, denied entrance through both the front and back doors to the realm of spirits, and yet too proud to haunt this world that he once ruled.
“Sakura Hannafin dies hornet-stung and suffocating as her airway swells shut,” Jane said, “and my Nick like a marionette manipulated, and some schoolteacher out in Minnesota immolates herself and others because a computer model says this is how to build a better world. And you should just fly to the Bahamas and live out your life in sun and splendor?”
She picked up the passport and the wallet and put them in the handbag that stood on the table.
Larkin had nothing, was nothing, and could say nothing but what he had said before. “You promised me a path to a life.”
“And there it is,” she said, pointing to the door through which earlier she had rolled him on a cart. “Learn the streets and how to live on them. Steal a supermarket cart and find your treasures in a hundred dumpsters.”
“I can’t live that way.”
“Many do.”
“There’s no way I can hide from these people, from D.J. They’ll find me in a homeless shelter as easy as in my favorite restaurant.”
“Then go home to your wife.”
“Her? She’ll know what’s happened the moment she sees me, that I’ve sold them out. She’ll be on the phone to D.J. in a minute.”
Jane said nothing.
“I beg you. All right? I beg you. The passport, the wallet.”
Again she pointed to the door.
“You can’t imagine what they’ll do to me. You can’t imagine.”
No pleasure abided in this for her, no warming of the heart by revenge, no sense that she was balancing the scales of justice. She knew only a loneliness as might have been felt by the sole survivor of a shipwreck, adrift on a flotsam of deck boards and fractured cargo crates, under a sky empty of all but the sun, the surrounding sea emptier still.
In a voice shorn not only of hope but also of despair, a voice dead to all emotion except perhaps existential dread, Larkin said, “I’m no good with pain. I won’t let them…do things to me. If I rush you now, you’ll have to shoot me.”
Jane raised the pistol, sans silen
cer, from her side and took it in a two-hand grip. “Leave this place.”
“You’re not cruel,” he said. “You won’t shoot to wound. You won’t leave me crazy with pain.”
She made no further promises.
He retreated to the essence that defined him, to the role of smug elitist prig, a sneer contouring his face as he said, “You’re dead already, you piece of shit. They’ll all know about you in the whispering room.”
He came at her, and she squeezed the trigger twice, the first round taking him in the throat, staggering him backward, the second a head shot, his features deforming into a grotesque countenance as if to preview the face that he would wear in a deep otherworld ablaze with fire that produced no light. As his head snapped back, his suit coat flared winglike, and he dropped as a bird shotgunned from the sky will drop, collapsing in a graceless splay-legged posture in the cheap aluminum-and-nylon-webbing chair that he would never have allowed to uglify the patio of the house in Beverly Hills, where now his widow waited.
26
* * *
Big and black and unmarked SUVs, windows tinted, battery-powered emergency swivels clamped in place between window glass and door frame flashing red and blue, oscillating sirens cutting the air with a sound as sharp as sword blades, they race one close behind the other, three in all, carrying a strike force of twelve men. They demand the road through neighborhoods where motorists pull out of the way in respect of authority, and then through communities where pedestrians and people sitting on stoops fade at the siren sound and seem never to have been there. They kill the sirens for the last two miles, making way with just the roar of engines and the stutter of tires shuddering across broken pavement.
Marshall Ackerman sits front passenger in the lead vehicle, wearing a Kevlar vest over jeans and sweater, holding in his lap a pistol converted aftermarket to fully automatic, with a twenty-round magazine. Two spare magazines are sleeved in his utility belt. If they can take Hawk by surprise and alive, they will, but if they kill her, there will be no penalty or grief. Likewise, Randall Larkin.
They slow and coast to the curb and stop half a block from the target building, a mid-century example of spiritless architecture, secular temple to industry, its god having long abandoned the place, corrugated walls warped and mortar weather-leached from between its concrete blocks.
If the front gate is locked, they will scale the fence. But the padlock shackle has been cut. The chain is easily unwound from the gatepost. The gate rolls aside with a minimum of rattling and clinking, and the twelve enter, fanning out to surround the factory.
Both ends of the long building feature roll-up truck doors as well as man-size doors. Logic makes the case that she would have parked the Mercedes behind the factory, out of sight of the street, before shepherding Randall Larkin inside, if in fact that is what she did before sending the sedan on a river cruise.
The three team leaders coordinate in murmured words, with hands-free earpiece walkie-talkies. There will be no danger from friendly crossfire.
Ackerman himself is second across the threshold, everyone in his team moving low and fast and spreading out at once on entering the cavernous space.
A moment to grasp what lies before them. More than a football-field length of heavy shadows layered to total darkness in some places. Just this side of the fifty-yard line, a sphere of light fading outward from what appears to be a gas lantern. Barrels, all manner of trash. An empty patio chair—and one not empty.
Although his head is cast back and his face not visible, there is no doubt that the man in the chair is dead, his posture too limp even for a sleeper. Warily, they move closer, until the blood on his shirt and suit confirm his condition. And now the face turned toward the ceiling, entry wound just above the bridge of the nose, features somewhat deformed by the overpressure of the detonation, but still recognizable as Randall Larkin.
With Larkin dead, Jane Hawk will be gone. They might have missed her by mere minutes.
Marshall Ackerman speaks into the mic that curves down from his earpiece. “We’re too late.”
In the wake of those three words, a low whump announces the detonation of an incendiary device and is followed by a thick gout of flame that dispels some of the farther darkness lying beyond the reach of the gas-lantern light, illuminating big hillocks of paper trash, among other things. The fire fountains perhaps twenty feet into the air and then drops back and splashes outward, igniting all it touches.
If Jane Hawk inadvertently left behind anything that could give them a lead on her, Ackerman and his men need to venture forward and grab what they can before the fire envelops it and the smoke blinds them.
That intention is foiled when they are halted by the sight of low movement across the floor, what seems for a moment to be only seething shadows formed and flung by flickering fire, but turns out to be a horde of rats, whip-tailed and scarlet-eyed, fleeing nests now bursting into flames.
As conflagrant forms of paper are whirled high and spin toward them on drafts born from the rapidly accelerating blaze, a flock of firebirds seeking nests of hair, Ackerman and his men wheel and run toward the open door with rats scampering across shoes, clinging for a moment to pant legs, trampled and crushed underfoot. The men slip on what they do not wish to think about, pinwheeling their arms to keep their balance, loath to fall among the squeaking multitude in all its filth and flea-bitten frenzy.
The men are less comrades than competitors as they collide and jostle at the narrow doorway, shoving at one another, coughing from their lungs the pale inhaled smoke, spitting out the taste of rodent waste as redolent on the air as the acrid fumes of burning things. Ackerman bursts from the churning smoke and into the morning light, among rats that stream across the weed-bristled blacktop in sun-blinded terror. Wheezing, he feels as if he has escaped death by a narrow margin. But though it is out of character for him to entertain such a thought, he also feels that the woman, with her incendiary device, has painted for them a foretelling of their fate.
27
* * *
You’re dead already….They’ll all know about you in the whispering room. She had no idea what Randall Larkin meant by the whispering room. No point in dwelling on it. If there was a place they called the whispering room, she’d know it when she found it.
The city bus growled through the late morning, seeming to be out of control when it gained any speed at all, lurching to the curb at each of the frequent stops, air brakes sighing as though with exasperation, wallowing back into traffic that didn’t want to admit it, less like a motor vehicle than like some hoven beast asserting privilege by virtue of its size.
At her window seat, Jane Hawk kept her head turned away from anyone who chose to settle beside her, less concerned about being recognized by pedestrians than by someone face-to-face with her.
She watched the sprawling city pass in fits and starts, its kaleidoscope of neighborhoods presenting ever-changing patterns, crowds bustling on errands that at the moment she could not to the least extent imagine. Nothing beyond the window seemed real to her. In the virtual reality that the world had become, only one truly real place existed: south of here in rural Orange County, at the end of a lane flanked by live oaks, a modest white clapboard house with a deep veranda, where her boy sheltered, safe with friends, two dogs alert to any threat.
Although she hoped to be there to visit with him before this hateful day ended, she would not allow herself to count on the grace of a reunion prior to setting off to Iron Furnace in faraway Kentucky. She needed to see Travis, to hear his voice, to hold him in her arms, but what was needed in this life was not often what was given. And wishing for anything seemed to summon the demons that would prevent the fulfillment of the wish.
She disembarked from the bus on Wilshire Boulevard, in Beverly Hills, and walked south into the residential flats where she had encountered the two teenagers, Guns and ZZ. Her Ford Escape was where she’d left it. In the cargo space were two suitcases, the leather tote, and the pl
astic bag full of wigs, everything as she had left it.
She could not yet set out for Orange County and Travis. She would have an early lunch. And then a task awaited her in the San Gabriel Valley before her work here was for a while concluded.
28
* * *
When Lawrence Hannafin keeps his two-o’clock appointment with Randall Larkin, he expects to find the secretary, Ellen, at her desk, where she has always been previously on his arrival. Instead the reception lounge is unstaffed. The door to Larkin’s suite stands open, and the rooms beyond lay quiet and shadowed.
Puzzled, he sits beside a corner magazine table and chooses an issue of Vanity Fair, which had some years earlier published a long excerpt from one of his books. He flips through pages, preferring not to begin an article that he will surely be unable to finish.
He is enjoying a photo spread of a young actress who knows the value of baring a generous amount of skin in the right publications, when Carter Woodbine enters the lounge. Tall, white-haired, American but as aristocratic in demeanor as any member of the British royal family, Woodbine does not venture down from the fourth floor except by elevator to the garage at the end of the day.
Hannafin puts down the magazine and rises to his feet and says, “Mr. Woodbine,” as the senior partner closes the door to the hall.
“Mr. Hannafin, will you join me in Randall’s office? I have some troubling news.”
Troubling is an understatement. In the privacy of Larkin’s office, Hannafin learns that Larkin is dead, abducted by Jane Hawk and almost surely shot by her after she flushed his Mercedes into a river swollen with recent rains.
“The fire was so intense, it will have left precious little of Randall,” says Woodbine, “and it’s not likely that the remains in the abandoned factory will soon be identified as his, if they ever are. In fact, we will ensure that they are never identified as his.”