by Dean Koontz
She and Luther exchanged glances, and he didn’t need to express his abhorrence for her to be aware of it.
“Seth,” she said, “you will forget this conversation, forget that you ever encountered us.”
“Yes.”
“You will sit here until I release you with the right words. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
She drew the pistol from her shoulder rig, and Luther drew his. She followed the sheriff into the hall, pausing at the threshold to look back into the room.
Seth Donner had not turned his head to follow them. He gazed up at the place Jane’s face had occupied, as if she had been a divine manifestation from whom he would await a second visitation, rapt and adoring, even through thirst and starvation.
20
* * *
Tom Proctor, twelve and thoroughly reliable, slipped into the library at 8:02, bringing with him Jimmy Cole, about whom Harley had been worried. Physically and emotionally fragile since day one, thin and pale to start, fading ever since, Jimmy had been the one most likely to forget the rendezvous or, if he came, to show up wearing the shoes he had been told to leave behind. Responsible Tom thought to look after him, and now the eight of them were gathered.
Harley said, “We’re going through that door over there, into the study, then along the service hall to the laundry and into the garage. I’m going to drive us out of here in the Escalade.”
“You can drive?” asked Jenny Boone.
“I can drive enough.”
Bobby Acuff, always cognizant of the potential for calamity, said, “You don’t have keys, we’re going nowhere without keys, we’re beat already.”
“I know where they keep the keys,” Harley said.
21
* * *
The kitchen redolent of roast chicken, of the fragrant steam rising from pots containing vegetables cooked in chicken broth, the hum of the oven fan and the susurrant rush of that warm air through the vent grille…A woman at the cooktop, her back to Jane and Luther, and a man standing at the dinette table, sliding dinner rolls from a tipped baking sheet into a serving basket…
Jane said, “Play Manchurian with me.”
The man looked up and the woman turned, and simultaneously they said, “All right.”
“Sit at the table.”
In the act of stirring something, the woman took a long-handled spoon from a pot and put it on the counter, and the man put down the baking sheet, and they sat as instructed.
“Stay here and wait for me,” Jane said, and they agreed, and she crossed the room to join Luther, who had already pressed open the door to the butler’s pantry.
She followed him through another door, into the dining room, where four staff members, dressed all in white as if they were consecrated in some cult of virgins, sat ready to eat at the table, while a man, also attired in white, poured ice water from a clear-glass pitcher jeweled with condensation.
“Play Manchurian with me,” Luther said on entrance.
The four at the table turned their heads toward him and chorused, “All right.”
But the man with the pitcher might have been distracted or perhaps a bit hard of hearing. He reacted not to Luther’s control command but rather to the turning of the others’ heads, looking up in surprise and pouring water past the aimed-for drinking glass onto a silver caddy that held shakers of salt, pepper, and other spices. He saw their weapons, shouted a warning, dropped the pitcher, and pivoted away from the seated four as shattered glass and crescents of ice glimmered across the tablecloth, borne on spilled water.
The fleeing man reached the archway before Jane called out, “Play Manchurian with me.”
Although the quartet at the table repeated their assent, she didn’t know if the fifth had heard her until she pursued him and found him standing in the hall as though he had forgotten where he was going and why he had dashed from the dining room.
His gaze conveyed confusion and fear and a sense that he was lost. His hands were fisted at his sides, the knuckles as sharp and white as if skin had split to reveal bone.
The torment in his eyes moved her, though not to pity, which was for the distress and misfortune of others that one didn’t share. Instead, sharp sympathy pierced her, for he had been robbed of his dignity by the people who would steal hers at the first opportunity. He had been shaken out of the life he’d been meant to live and into a life shaped for him, not unlike how she’d been reduced from a hunter of fugitives to a fugitive herself, from wife to widow, from being a mother every day to being a mother as events allowed.
She holstered the pistol. “I’m not here to hurt you. Do you believe me?”
“Yes. Of course. Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
“George.”
“Don’t be afraid, George. Not of me.”
He seemed to seek answers in her eyes. “What’s happened to me?”
“Don’t you know, George?”
“Something’s happened. What was isn’t.”
Nothing could be done for him. Slaves shackled could be freed by the cutting of chains, by the passage of laws. But the nanoweb spun across the surface of his brain, its fibers woven deep into his gray matter, allowed no casting off of chains and could not be undone by even a law of the best intentions.
“Don’t be afraid,” she repeated, and though it sounded foolish, it was the only thing she could think to tell him.
“Are you afraid?” he asked.
“No,” Jane lied.
“All right, then.” His fists relaxed. “All right.”
“Come back into the dining room, George. Sit down with the others.”
With lamblike docility, he did as she told him, but she felt none of the worthiness of a good shepherd.
22
* * *
The garage was paved with all-but-impervious quartzite and offered spaces for twelve vehicles, though only four were assigned to the live-in staff of the fake school. The northwest corner was occupied by an open workshop with built-in cabinets, workbench, and all kinds of tools racked on perfboard, everything clean and neat.
The garage was off limits to the kids. But Harley had been there a few times. The staff couldn’t do anything worse to him than what they had already done by imprisoning him. Their punishments didn’t matter to him: no dessert for dinner, stupid things like that. Until last December, he had been able to spend time here, but then something had changed; now they seemed to know the moment he stepped into the garage, and they came right away to get him.
The previous November, he’d hidden in the Cadillac Escalade, hoping someone would drive it out, not knowing he was lying in the cargo area behind the backseat. From that vantage point, he had raised his head to watch Noreen return from town in the Ford Explorer. She had unlocked one of the drawers that flanked the workbench and put the Ford key in there and locked it away.
Now, in their stocking feet, the eight inmates gathered in front of the workbench. Although the cabinets were well constructed, Harley believed he could quickly force the lock. From the array of tools, he selected a claw hammer and a screwdriver.
“No, no! They’ll hear,” Bobby Acuff fretted. “They’ll hear, and they’ll come, and they’ll kill us all.”
“They’re at dinner on the other side of the house,” Harley said. “The way I’m going to do it, they won’t hear.”
“They can hear as good as dogs,” Bobby Acuff said. “They hear stuff other people can’t hear. They hear everything.”
“Oh, please, Bobby, stick a sock in it,” said Jenny Boone. “Even if they hear, the most they’ll do is not give you any cake with dinner tomorrow.”
“No, they’ll kill us all,” Bobby insisted. “Just because they haven’t killed us until now doesn’t mean they won’t kill us when they want to.”
23
* * *
Intuition was the highest form of knowledge, antecedent to all teaching, not reliant on reasoning. Jane had great respect for this inbor
n wisdom, as it had saved her life on several occasions. She intuited now that things were not going as well as they seemed to be, that a threat impended, soon to blindside them.
On the second floor, she and Luther hurried along the south hall, throwing open doors, searching room to room. Some spaces were unfurnished. There were also suites in which children obviously lived but in which they could not at the moment be found.
In the third suite, Jane saw something that halted her—a pair of sneakers by the side of a bed.
Luther stepped out of the bathroom. “Nobody here.”
“Are there shoes in the closet?” she asked.
He pulled open that door, switched on the light, leaned across the threshold. “Clothes but no shoes.”
Where are the children? Jane had asked Seth Donner.
In their rooms upstairs.
How can you be sure?
I’m aware of their locaters.
Locaters? What locaters?
The locaters in their shoes.
She remembered a pair of sneakers in the first furnished suite. They had been left beside an armchair. And in one of the other suites, a pair had stood by the bathtub.
In the hallway, Luther opened a door and said, “Not furnished,” and Jane went past him to the next suite, where a pair of sneakers stood to one side of the door, as if they had been taken off just before the kid departed.
“They’re making a break for it,” she said, “if they haven’t broken out already.”
As she ran toward the stairs, intuition hounded her. Some great peril was almost upon them, but she didn’t know what it would be or from where it would come.
She remembered something else Seth Donner had said: Ever since the upgrade.
24
* * *
With his tongue between his teeth, Harley Higgins focused intently on the job.
The screwdriver, the blade of which was inserted between drawer front and cabinet face, featured a rubber-coated handle, so that the hammer striking it produced little sound. The risk lay in the hard crack of wood splintering and the screech of the lock parts as they strained against one another.
Bobby Acuff predicted catastrophe every ten seconds, and Jenny Boone said, “Acuff, get your head right, or I’ll kick your ass up to your shoulders, so you’ll have to take off your shirt to crap.”
Bump of hammer driving the screwdriver blade like a chisel. Bump, bump. Dry wood splitting, old brass parts shearing.
Lock and wood parted, and the drawer came open to reveal a metal box.
Harley took the box from the drawer and put it on the workbench and opened the lid. Electronic keys for the four vehicles.
Just then the connecting door to the house opened, and two people he didn’t know came into the garage.
Bobby Acuff let out a thin cry of despair, but Harley had a sudden good feeling. One of the strangers was an old black guy—he must have been fifty, jeez, maybe even older—but he was big, and you could tell he was tough in spite of his age. There was a girl, too. She looked as though she’d stepped out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog, except for what she was wearing. But somehow you could tell that she and the black guy came from the same place, were in the same business, neither of them being people who took any shit.
25
* * *
In their fear, in their postures of dreadful expectation, the kids would have broken Jane’s heart if she’d had time for the more tender emotions. Even the biggest of them seemed terribly small, vulnerable, and their faces revealed that they were wounded souls.
She told them the half lie that she was FBI, and Luther told them the truth that he was a sheriff, and the kids were desperate enough to believe them without hesitation.
“We’re taking you out of here,” she promised.
A boy of about fourteen held up an electronic key. “We can use the Escalade.”
“No,” Luther said. “We’ll use one of their remotes to open the main gate, but if we take their vehicles, they’ll be on us like flies on sugar. We’ve got two cars. We can just about fit all of you in them.”
“We don’t have shoes,” one of the girls reported.
“Yes, we know why,” Jane said. “We’ve got to get on the road. We’ll buy shoes tomorrow.”
From outside, beyond the garage door, came the sound of engines in the driveway and the bark of brakes. More than one vehicle.
“I’ll go look,” she told Luther, and hurried into the house.
At the front of the residence, she made her way through the dark living room by the faint inspill of light from the foyer. She pulled aside a drapery and saw half a dozen vehicles in the long driveway, cars and SUVs, the drivers just now dousing the headlights on the most recent arrivals. Someone had been able to open the huge bronze gate. Another car pulled in from the county road and stopped, and the headlights went off.
People were getting out of the vehicles, men and women but mostly men. At least a dozen. To get here this fast, they must have come from the nearby resort. But in response to what call?
No one approached the door. They stood under the portico roof and arrayed along the driveway, murky figures lit little and low and at odd angles by the landscape lamps, more human shapes than human beings, their faces veiled in shadows. They were not restless, but stood like witnesses to some forthcoming and meaningful event to which they would one day testify. They didn’t appear to talk to one another, as if they knew why they were here and what they must do.
Jane suspected they were waiting for others who were en route from a greater distance, from the town of Iron Furnace, where it was Christmas all year long.
Although she stood in darkness, she sensed that some of these unwanted visitors were aware of her and staring at her. She let the drapery fall into place and hurried through the ground floor to Seth Donner’s room.
He hulked on the chair in which she’d left him, but he no longer stared at the vacant air where her face had once been. He stared instead at his hands resting together on one thigh. Nothing of his mood or thoughts could be discerned in his slack features.
“Seth, are you with me?”
The big man raised his head, and his gaze had no terminus, as if he looked through her to infinity. His eyes were intact, yet he seemed as blind as eyeless Samson brought to his death in Gaza. “Yeah. I’m with you.”
“Earlier you mentioned the locaters in the kids’ shoes. You said you’re aware of them at all times.”
“The kids are in their rooms now. Every one of them.”
“You said you’ve known where the children are at all times, ever since your upgrade.”
“At all times. Since December,” he confirmed.
“What upgrade are you talking about, Seth?”
He frowned. “Well, you know…the upgrade.”
“What do you mean by upgrade?”
His frown deepened, and he didn’t respond.
“Play Manchurian with me, Seth.”
“All right.”
“You said you always know where the kids are because of their locaters.”
“We all know. We don’t need to track them with an app anymore.”
“You once tracked them on smartphones?”
“Not anymore.”
“So how do you track them now?”
“They display.”
“The locaters display? Where do they display, Seth?”
He looked perplexed. “They just display.”
In the abandoned factory, before Randall Larkin rushed her and forced her to kill him, his face had shaped into an arrogant sneer and he had gloated, You’re dead already, you piece of shit. They’ll all know about you in the whispering room.
“Seth, what is the whispering room?”
“It’s just a room where we go.”
“A room in this house?”
He thought about it before he said, “No.”
“Where is the whispering room, Seth?”
He raised one hand and tapped his f
orehead, which beetled over his deep-set eyes. “I guess it’s here somewhere. I never really think about it. It’s just here somewhere.”
She was fitting it together piece by piece, and she didn’t like the picture that was forming.
The great house remained quiet. No windows shattering, no doors being broken down. Not yet.
“Is there something other than GPS displays in the listening room, Seth? Do you hear any voices there?”
“Sometimes a voice, just whispering real low.”
“Whose voice?”
He shrugged. “Anyone’s.”
“Do you ever whisper in the whispering room, Seth?”
“A few times.”
“Who do you whisper to?”
“Everyone.”
Her heart knocked, each beat as if struck from the taut skin of an aboriginal drum, summoning her deepest and most primitive fears. “Everyone in Iron Furnace—they hear what you whisper?”
“Yeah. They all hear.”
An upgrade to the nanotech control mechanism in their heads. A feature that linked them all through microwave transmissions.
They were no longer six hundred controlled individuals. They were that and more. They were a hive.
She thought of George, pouring water in the dining room. He had failed to hear the control command when Luther first spoke it, and he had attempted to flee. She’d called out to him and caught up with him in the hallway. During those seconds between when he had seen them with their weapons drawn and when he had come under her control in the hall, what had George said in the whispering room? At the least, he must have called for help.
“Seth, do you still have a smartphone?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the number?”
He gave it to her, and she repeated it several times, until she felt that she would remember it.