The Whispering Room

by Dean Koontz

  “But the Mercedes—”

  “Was his, of course. We are in the process of inventing a story that we will coordinate with Mrs. Larkin. You may know Diamanta.”

  “Not well.”

  “Then you will want to spend a few hours in her company, to get the flavor of her personality. We want you to craft the story we invent into a major newspaper piece.”

  “But…what story?”

  “Right now, we think he will have attempted to fake his suicide by sending his S600 into the river. As a firm, we will reluctantly comment on the possibility that he stole millions from us.”

  “He stole millions from you?”

  With a warm smile and a wave of his hand, Woodbine says, “Good heavens, no. We’ve financial controls that make that impossible. But Randall did have a Grand Cayman account that he thought no one knew about, in the name of Ormond Heimdall, with a current balance of twenty million. Eventually it will be learned that, on this coming Monday, just three days after his disappearance, eighteen million of that twenty was transferred into even murkier banking jurisdictions elsewhere in the world. You’ll be given the details for your story.”

  Lawrence Hannafin knows that he is in rarefied company with Carter Woodbine, that his role here is to do what it has been said he will do, as if Woodbine is an oracle describing to him a future that the fates have set in stone. Yet he can’t help asking, “Why not go with the truth, hang it on this damn Jane Hawk, where the blame belongs?”

  This smile of Woodbine’s is different from the other, more like that of a patient adult answering the question of a slow and naïve child. “Miss Hawk has had quite a run of luck, but where it will soon run is out. We do not take her seriously. Meanwhile, we don’t want this firm to be associated with her in the public’s mind. We don’t wish anyone to be wondering why a rogue FBI agent and a threat to national security should kidnap, torture, and murder one of the partners of Woodbine, Kravitz, Larkin, and Benedetto.”

  “She tortured him?”

  Woodbine shrugs. “One can only assume.”

  Suddenly Hannafin realizes that perhaps he is slow and naïve, for it just then occurs to him that he might have somehow led the Hawk bitch to Randall.

  Woodbine favors him with another smile that Hannafin can’t interpret, though it chills him.

  “As soon as you know what you want me to write, I’ll be on it. You won’t be unhappy with the finished piece.”

  “I know I won’t,” Woodbine agrees. “We have your numbers. Stand by for a call.”

  “I will,” Hannafin promises. “I’ll stand by.”

  Woodbine graciously escorts him to the elevators and sends him to the garage, where he is parked in a stall marked CLIENT. He is somewhat surprised—but relieved—that no one is waiting for him.

  Although he had intended to have dinner out, Hannafin drives straight home, so that he can be standing by.

  In the kitchen, he makes a large Scotch on the rocks. As he carries it to his study, the ice clinks and the Scotch repeatedly slops to the lip of the tumbler, but he manages not to spill any.

  Sitting at his desk, after taking a long pull on the drink, as he puts the glass down, he does spill Scotch when he realizes that six silver-framed photographs of him and Sakura are arranged there. A few months after her death—a decent interval—he stored her damn collection of happy-couple photographs in the living-room sideboard.

  He thrusts to his feet and hurries to the living room. Other photographs have been distributed there in thoughtful arrangements on end tables, across the fireplace mantel.

  His gun is in his bedroom, in a nightstand drawer. He rushes to the stairs. Halts. Stands there. Looks toward the second floor.

  He almost calls out her name. Jane Hawk?

  But he does not do so, because he fears that she will answer.

  29

  * * *

  In a library not far from Lawrence Hannafin’s house, Jane sat at a workstation in the computer alcove and verified, as best she could, what Larkin had told her about Iron Furnace, Kentucky.

  Iron Furnace Lake Resort was owned by a private corporation, Terra Firma Enterprises, which held a portfolio of six jewelbox hospitality-business properties. Terra Firma was owned by Apoidea Trust, which had an address on Grand Cayman Island, a tax haven.

  The combined value of the five U.S. companies known to be owned by the Apoidea Trust: two billion dollars. The director of the trust: an Englishman named Derek Lennox-Heywood.

  People sufficiently interested to speculate about such things believed Apoidea was one of several trusts that oversaw the assets of David James Michael. Although a link between him and Apoidea couldn’t be established beyond doubt, photos existed of D.J. and Lennox-Heywood together at charitable events in New York and London.

  The house that Larkin said was D.J.’s secret retreat, a five-acre estate on Iron Furnace Lake, not far from the five-star resort, was held by Apiculus LLC. The owner of Apiculus was a corporation in Liechtenstein, about which she could find no information.

  On a hunch, she looked up the word apoidea: the name of the superfamily that included hymenopterous insects such as honeybees and bumblebees. And Apiculus meant a small sharp point, such as a leaf tip…or the stinger of a bee.

  She felt sure that in his desperation, Randall Larkin had told her the truth. Apoidea and Apiculus seemed to confirm it.

  For whatever reason, perhaps a superstitious one, David James Michael tended to name things with words that began with the letter A. He called his inner circle of conspirators Arcadians. The hateful brothels staffed with girls whose minds had been scrubbed and then programmed was Aspasia. Now Apoidea and Apiculus.

  However, confirming Larkin’s claim that D.J. could be found in the Iron Furnace house through the end of March wasn’t a simple task. Unlike celebrities, people worth billions of dollars tended to guard their privacy. They couldn’t be easily tracked by Star Spotter or similar services. D. J. Michael was scheduled to attend a charity gala in Miami in May and a conference on climate change in England in June. Otherwise, as far as anyone knew, he would be spending the rest of the year snugged in a coffin containing a cool bed of soil from Transylvania.

  She put together search strings, trying to find any reference to his having been in Iron Furnace previously. Nada.

  As she was about to log off, she wondered if Bertold Shenneck, the recently deceased scientist and Arcadian, partner with D.J. in a company named Far Horizons, had ever spent time in Iron Furnace. Bingo. In March of the previous year, Shenneck chaired a four-day conference on the future medical applications of nanotechnology, sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration.

  By association at least, D.J. was tied to Iron Furnace. But she wished that she had more reason to believe the billionaire actually used the place as a secret retreat.

  She went to Google Earth and conducted a look-down on the town and the resort as it had been when this database had been created.

  Having had a minute to consider that the FDA had sponsored Shenneck’s conference, she wondered if scoping out the estate owned by Apiculus LLC would trigger an alarm somewhere. D.J. seemed to have allies in the security agencies—CIA, NSA, Homeland Security—as well as in the FBI, so perhaps they had done him the favor of putting this five-acre property on a watch list, to be sure that everyone checking it out would be themselves checked out.

  She took a Kleenex from a coat pocket, tore off a piece, wet it with saliva, and pasted it over the computer’s camera lens.

  Only then, she scanned farther on Lakeview Road and found a satellite shot of the target estate. When she tried to zero down on it, the magnification function failed to work.

  She went to Google Street View, cruised past the front entrance to the resort, and continued west on Lakeview Road. As she approached the Apiculus-owned estate, the computer screen blinked to gray. The camera function had been triggered from some remote location. If the lens hadn’t been covered, a shoulders-up black silhouette of her
would have been centered on the gray screen, and an Arcadian in one security agency or another would have had her photograph.

  She didn’t take the time to log off. She killed the power to the workstation and got up and grabbed her handbag and exited the library and walked briskly three blocks to where she’d left her car.

  All the evidence putting D. J. Michael in Iron Furnace was circumstantial. However, a preponderance of circumstantial evidence was sufficient to convict in a court of law. And everything supported Randall Larkin’s claim that currently D.J. would be found out there in Kentucky. Her next move was decided.

  30

  * * *

  In the early Minnesota dark, Luther Tillman stood on his back steps, beyond the porch-roof overhang. He was in shirtsleeves, with no coat, invigorated by the cold air.

  There was no aurora borealis, but the stars in their ceaseless nuclear reactions shone in multitudes, more stars than grains of sand on all the world’s beaches, spanning countless light-years and billions of calendar years, through an airless silence, until the farthest edge of the universe, where the last bright bodies poised on the brink of a void that the mind could not quite conceive.

  Considering this near infinity of suns and worlds and moons and mystery, the argument could be made that the life of one forty-year-old schoolteacher, never married and childless, at work in a largely rural county, did not count for much. What if her lovely stories had been put into print and sold millions of books, and what if she had not checked out with a horrific act of violence? Nevertheless, her life and influence would be but a few sweet notes in a symphony that already must be measured in thousands of millennia, leaving no more impression on the sea of time than would the single song of a robin.

  If any life was only of the most ephemeral importance, which was to say of no importance whatsoever, then all lives were without meaning, including those of presidents and movie stars and county sheriffs and the wives thereof and the children thereof. Likewise, no importance either could be accorded to the birds of the air, the beasts of field and forest, the creatures of the sea. There were those who lived by that philosophy or pretended to themselves that they did, but Luther could neither live by it in truth or as a lie.

  Cora Gundersun hadn’t merely done something terrible. Something terrible had first been done to her. And it mattered what that something might have been.

  When Luther returned to the kitchen and began to set the table for the dinner that Rebecca was cooking, she said, “I guess I know what it means when you stand coatless in the cold for half an hour, listening to the stars.”

  “Listening? Have I missed something? Have the stars started talking recently?”

  She said, “They’ve always talked to you.”

  “Well, if they have, I’m not sure what they said tonight.”

  Turning from the cooktop, wooden spoon in hand, she favored him with her do-I-know-you-or-do-I-know-you? look. “You mean you didn’t hear them tell you to go to that place, that Iron Furnace Lake?”

  “That’s all the way to Kentucky,” he said as he folded paper napkins beside each plate.

  “So you—what?—took a week off just to lay around the house?”

  “I can lay around as well as anyone.”

  “Twenty-six years married, haven’t seen you do it yet.”

  “Maybe not, but a man’s got to start laying around sometime.”

  “Which won’t be until you get back from Iron Furnace.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “You’re a witchy woman, the way you read a man. Will it worry you too much if I go?”

  Stirring the pot of brown gravy, she said, “What did I tell you about Twyla and college? Big city, small town, smaller town—these days, every place is as safe or unsafe as every other. You just keep in mind what you need to come home to.”

  “What I’m lucky that I have to come home to.”

  She said, “There you go.”

  31

  * * *

  Jane on the road. The wheeled millions going and coming, more horsepower combined than all the horses that ever lived, windshields in the northbound lanes burning orange with reflection, the light in the west not what it once was…

  Regardless of their beauty, sunsets raised in Jane the thought that the coming night might be the longest ever, with no morning beyond, not just a personal death, but the entire world stilled in its turning. Her concern was more disquietude than fear and had not always been with her. She wondered if she might be alone in this disquiet or whether these days other people experienced it as well, and she suspected that all of them knew the feeling whether they would admit it or not.

  Soon after nightfall, she would be with her child. If in fact all things of the earth that had been spooling out across uncounted centuries were soon to ravel up into nothing and be gone as if they had never been, she asked only that in the hour of final retraction, she should hold Travis in her arms and speak to him of her love and say his father’s name.

  32

  * * *

  In a nest of luxury high above Wilshire Boulevard, where the tall windows present a sky afire above a city settling toward the pleasures of day’s end…

  Although he isn’t at the moment acting on behalf of Volunteers for a Better Future, Jason Alan Drucklow cannot resist using the back door into the NSA’s ten-thousand-room castle of data to satisfy his curiosity about Jane Hawk. He wants to know what happened at the abandoned factory, but also whatever else she has done that Marshall Ackerman and his many associates have been sharing with one another by phone and in their various encrypted messages. She fascinates Jason, not as Cammy fascinates him—no need for the lovely Ms. Newton to be concerned—but rather as fate fascinates him, as the possibility of strange alien intelligences elsewhere in the universe fascinates him.

  Hawkwoman, as they have taken to calling her, is no less an interest of Cammy’s than of Jason’s. As he uncovers each new morsel of information about what she has done, he shares it with his best girl.

  Indeed, Cammy is the one who compares Hawkwoman to one of those computer viruses that changes its digital footprint each time it replicates, which makes it undetectable to most antivirus software. As she pours a glass of Caymus cabernet sauvignon for each of them, here on the cusp of night, she says, “Wow! She’s like a polymorphic virus, huh?”

  This sobers Jason before he’s taken a sip of wine. “Polymorphic virus? Maybe we better hope not. Don’t want anything to happen to this cushy job.”

  1

  * * *

  Minutes after Jane’s arrival at the house in rural Orange County, in the early dark, with the moon not yet afloat on the eastern sky, Travis took her to the stable behind the house, the crisp leaves of live oaks crunching underfoot.

  “See, Exmoor ponies came from England,” the boy told her excitedly. “This one, she was born here. But they’re from England. Ponies were in England like ten thousand years before people. They had scary saber-toothed tigers then and these giant old mastodons. The tigers and mastodons, they’re gone long ago, but not Exmoor ponies. Exmoor ponies are forever.”

  The hanging lamps in the center aisle poured brandy-colored light onto a floor embedded with hoof-stamped bits of straw. Drifts of soft shadows smoothed the corners and sabled those stalls that were empty.

  Bella and Sampson stood side by side in their enclosures, craning their necks over the half doors, nickering hello, tails swishing across stall boards.

  Jane and Travis would visit the mare and stallion, but not before he introduced her to the survivor of saber-tooths that waited across the way from the larger horses, in a stall with a door cut lower. She was a bay mare with a darker brown mane. Her eyes were large and wide apart and suggestive of keen intelligence.

  “Isn’t she really beautiful?” Travis asked.

  “She really is.”

  “Her name’s Hannah. We just got her Tuesday.”

  Hannah had a clean throatlatch and fine neck, shoulders well laid back,
a deep, wide chest. The pony was full-grown, standing at most twelve hands high, no more than forty-nine or fifty inches, yet it seemed too big for the boy.

  Although Jane knew her concern was exaggerated if not entirely misplaced, she said, “You’re careful with her?”

  “Yeah, sure. She’s real gentle.”

  “She’s strong, and she can kick.”

  “She never kicks me.”

  “You better always wear your helmet when you ride.”

  “Yeah. I can mount by myself already, Mom. I can ride kind of. We don’t ride fast. It’s Gavin and me, not just me myself.”

  “You always do what Gavin tells you with horses.”

  “I will. Yeah. I do.”

  She put an arm around the boy and pulled him against her side, counseling herself not to leave him with memories only of a nagging mom. “I’m proud of you, cowboy.”

  “When did Daddy learn to ride?”

  “Raised on a Texas ranch? Probably as young as you.”

  “He did rodeo.”

  “He did indeed. Before he joined the Marines.”

  “Can we go there, to Texas, someday?”

  “You were there once, when you were just three.”

  “I kind of remember, but I don’t.”

  “When all this is over, we’ll go again. Your grandma and grandpa are great people.”

  “You got to watch me ride tomorrow.”

  “I have to be on the road early, but I’ll wait to see you ride. I wouldn’t miss that.”

  He’d brought two quartered apples in a large paper cup. He fed two pieces to Hannah, and the pony took them almost quicker than the eye could follow, blessed as it was with prehensile lips peculiar to its breed.