by Dean Koontz
“What is that place?” Hendrickson asks.
“Genovese Ristorante.”
Tillman turns from the restaurant. Various cameras capture him as he walks to the end of the block, rounds the corner, goes into an alleyway, and enters the restaurant by a back door.
“Why would he do that? Show me an interior.”
The tech finds the numbers for the two cameras that cover the public area of the restaurant, specifies date and time. The video appears on a split screen. Tillman enters the room from the kitchen, approaches a waitress, indicates a booth, is escorted to it.
Fast-forward. Tillman orders. He eats. He leaves.
The technician calls up the exterior shot to see where the man went on leaving Genovese. Tillman steps to one of the Pembury Blue conifers and waits.
A woman exits the restaurant. It’s not yet twilight, but the overcast and the hour conspire to prevent a clear view of her face.
Tillman engages her in conversation. They move away together. He stops at a parked car to retrieve something from the trunk.
“Later, enhance that car and get me a license number if you can,” Hendrickson says.
Tillman and the woman proceed to a tavern. Wine for her, beer for him. None of the cameras gets a clear view of her face.
Fast forward. Neither Tillman nor the woman seems interested in drinking. They review some kind of book together. When they get up to leave, she all but directly faces a camera.
“Freeze!” Hendrickson says. He stares at the woman. Auburn hair. Glasses. He can’t see the color of her eyes. She’s striking but…she might be anyone.
He needs to use Stacia O’Dell and these three technicians to undertake tasks involving sensitive national-security databases that they must not recall having violated, for then they will know him as someone other than the CEO of Terra Firma Enterprises, and they will be agitated.
He says, “Play Manchurian with me.”
The four of them respond, “All right.”
“From this point forward, everything we do here will not be retained in your memory once I release you. Instead, you will have memories only that we tried and failed to track Martin Moses and this woman once they drove out of town. Do you understand?”
Four yeses.
“Okay,” says Hendrickson. “Let’s get busy.” He explains how to tap the NSA facial database and apply facial recognition. “Do it.”
11
* * *
Even though the foolishness of its elites had diminished its prospects and though many among its people lived with the foreboding of terrible loss and tragic withering, this was still a big country in terms of territory and native spirit, so that to drive it was both an exhausting and encouraging experience.
By the time they reached Ardmore, Oklahoma, Jane Hawk had found the outer limits of caffeine’s ability to counterpunch sleep. She didn’t believe a cure had yet been invented for her needle-through-the-temples headache. Sunshine sawed at her eyes. Tinnitus as thin and eerie as the cry of something born in an alien world laid down a one-note background to all other sounds.
The children, who had slept restlessly en route from Tennessee to Arkansas the previous night, were not in much better shape than Jane, but none of them complained.
They took two family-size motel rooms, each with two king-size beds and one rollaway single. The four boys roomed with Luther, the four girls with Jane.
From a pizzeria across the street, Luther and Harley fetched takeout for an early dinner, while Jane and Jenny hit the motel vending machines for sodas.
Two girls were assigned to each king-size bed. Jane would sleep on the rollaway, her shoulder rig and pistol within easy reach under that narrow bed.
As she ate and as she helped the girls prepare for the night, she yearned for sleep but didn’t worry much about her many enemies. Those in Iron Furnace who had witnessed the extraction of the eight children were without memories of what they’d seen. She had taken all the usual precautions. She and Luther were in two untrackable vehicles. The Tech Arcadians, a crowd as puerile as the name they gave to their insane enterprise, might wonder if she had squeezed from Randall Larkin the facts about Iron Furnace and if she might have something to do with the disappearance of the kids. They could not be sure, however, and they couldn’t know where she had gone.
She and Luther and the children would have a long and restful sleep. In the morning, they would set out on an easy five- or six-hour drive to Sacket Ranch west of Austin, where Leland and Nadine would give the children a home, counseling, whatever therapy they needed, and hope.
12
* * *
The massive oak tree at the northwest corner of the rear yard harbored the floors of a dozen houses in its great trunk, cabinets aplenty in its larger limbs, doors and lintels and fireplace mantels potential. Standing rooted in the earth, it also provided both shade and a place where the Hawks felt they could converse in privacy that perhaps their already built house did not any longer provide.
When Ancel returned from Chase Longrin’s place, he poured two glasses of cabernet and took Clare outside, ostensibly to watch the sunset from the pair of redwood chairs that stood under the tree. The sun swelled as it sank, and the clouds caught fire. Starlings flocked to cavities in the oak and to havens in the eaves of the stables, retreating from the threat of nocturnal raptors.
He shared with Clare the news from Chase, and they decided to leave for Leland and Nadine Sacket’s place at three o’clock in the morning. The ranch hands upon whom Ancel relied lived off-site and did not come to work until six o’clock. Juan Saba, the ranch manager, and his wife, Marie, lived here, in a residence three hundred yards from the main house, and it was Juan’s habit to arise half an hour before first light. Ancel and Clare would slip away in the night with no fear of being trackable, for they would go overland on horseback.
13
* * *
As if granitized, Hendrickson for a moment draws no breath as he stands behind the technician at the workstation. On the large monitor, the screen is divided vertically, and though the two faces are beautiful, they are also portraits of menace, versions of that third of the three Fates, Atropos, who cuts the thread of life.
An inspiration for paranoia in many people over the years, Hendrickson succumbs to paranoia of his own. The facial-recognition software confirms that the countenance of the woman in the tavern matches, to the millimeter and to the precise degree of angle, each of twenty-eight points of comparison to the on-file image of Jane Hawk, which is the most recent photo taken for her Bureau ID.
She damn well is a polymorphic virus, as some have called her.
Randall Larkin might have been fully broken, might have told her about Iron Furnace. But there were things Larkin didn’t know for the simple reason that he had no need for that information. Within Arcadian circles, details are supposed to be shared solely on a need-to-know basis, just as is the case in official agencies like the CIA. Larkin had no need to know the sentence that accessed the command mechanism in an adjusted person—Play Manchurian with me—and therefore could not have revealed it to Jane Hawk.
However, the cunning bitch has gotten those four words. She is now able to take control of any of the adjusted people, not just in Iron Furnace but wherever she might find them.
Hendrickson expels his breath in two words spoken as one, “Ohshit!”
Another thought: If Hawk somehow has learned of the whispering room, she can use one of the adjusted people in this town to access all of them and issue a command that they will uniformly obey.
What if by phone she tells them to leave Iron Furnace en masse? Tells them to proceed to some authority unlikely to be within the Arcadian sphere of influence and there announce their enslavement with one voice? Or directs them to convene in Times Square or some even more public venue to denounce D. J. Michael and insist on the existence of the nanomachine implants that control them?
He feels lightheaded and nauseated, as if an ulcerous mas
s has ruptured, flooding his stomach with blood, leaving his brain starved of oxygen.
That she hasn’t already done something dramatic with these six hundred adjusted people is surely because she has not yet thought of it. Perhaps caught up in the urgent need to free the children and convey them to some safe redoubt, she hasn’t had the time or the clarity of mind to realize the power she possesses.
There is a way to change the accessing sentence by which the command mechanism is opened for new instructions, make it something other than Play Manchurian with me. But Hendrickson is ignorant of that process because it hasn’t been deemed that he needs to know it.
“Please excuse me,” he says to Stacia O’Dell and the security technicians, as if he owes their kind courtesy, which he does not. They are of a class far beneath him and were before being adjusted; they are now at the bottom of any conceivable caste structure.
He retreats to a far corner of the bunker to use a phone there. Because of his fumbling fingers, he has to call Eva Kleitner, the director of the lab in Virginia, three times before he gets the number correct.
The tremor in his voice embarrasses Booth Hendrickson as he urgently conveys to Kleitner the need to use the whispering room to change the accessing sentence as quickly as that can be done, by whatever process it can be accomplished. He speaks frankly because his phone is programmed to scramble his words, and hers is capable of unscrambling them.
She says, “The good little plebs in Iron Furnace have all had the recent upgrade, the whispering room, so I’ll only need about an hour and a half.”
“Excellent.”
“But what about all the rest of these plodders—the walking dead on the Hamlet list, the proles in key positions, the Aspasia pumps? They’re all over the country. None have had the upgrade. We don’t even know yet whether we want them to have the upgrade. That was for the special situation of Iron Furnace. We’ll have to contact them one at a time to change the access sentence.”
“Whatever it takes. It has to be done.”
“Even if I put all my trusted people on it, that’s going to take weeks.”
“Weeks? How many are you talking about?”
“All classes combined—over sixteen thousand.”
Because he has known little fear in life, Hendrickson rises above it now. If he is still trembling, it is with anger bordering on rage that an uppity piece of tail like Jane Hawk should by some combination of animal instinct and blind luck have caused them so much grief. “None of this would be necessary if the cheeky bitch were as dead as she deserves to be.”
“Why don’t you see to it?”
“I soon will. We’re running her down right now. Meanwhile, change the access sentence for the six hundred locals here and everyone at the four Aspasias. Those are the only adjusted people she knows about. Before she can find another one, she’ll either be dead or adjusted herself.”
14
* * *
After dinner, by interior corridors, Rebecca and Jolie Tillman returned to their second-floor room in the motor inn. They didn’t turn on lights but guided each other through the darkness to one of the two windows, where they parted the blackout draperies to study the parking lot in which earlier they’d left Robbie Stassen’s Buick station wagon.
“If they tailed us all the way here to Rockford,” Rebecca whispered, “they’d be watching the station wagon. But I don’t see anyone watching.”
“If they’re experienced at surveillance,” Jolie whispered, “then we won’t see them right away, unless they’re two hopeless dickheads.”
“That’s a word I don’t need to hear again from you, dear.”
Jolie whispered, “What word? You mean—hopeless?”
As a Range Rover drove through the parking lot, its headlights briefly bathed a paneled van parked in shadows. The transient wash of light revealed two men in the dark beyond the windshield.
“Did you see that, Mom?”
“I’m afraid I did. Was one of them the guy who bought takeout?”
“I wouldn’t bet my sweet butt on it, but from where they’re sitting, they have a clear view of that stupid Buick wagon. So I’m inclined to apply Platonism to the issue and say, yes, they’re on our case.”
“Platonism, huh? How does that work?”
“The truth of the world is ideas, not material things. The two dudes in that van are the current representations of an unchanging and true idea.”
“What unchanging and true idea?”
“Evil. They’re sleazy criminal scumbags. They’ve got some kind of bug on the Buick. We can’t go anywhere they won’t find us. We’re toast.”
“You’re right about the bug, dear. But we’re not toast.”
“If we’re not toast, Mother, why are we whispering?”
Rather than answer the question, Rebecca whispered, “Your dad will be calling at nine o’clock. He’ll know what to do.”
“Yes, but that’s two hours. What if they come kill us in the meantime?”
“Why would they follow us all this way just to kill us?”
“I didn’t say ‘just to.’ They might want to steal all your money, rape us multiple times, and then kill us.”
“This is a quiet, upscale motor inn, Jolie. All of that would be too noisy.”
“Not if they have a passkey, Tasers, chloroform, and enough self-control not to yell yippee-ky-yay in the act of coitus. I might not sound like it, Mom, but I’m scared.”
Rebecca had been trying not to alarm her daughter, but she had arrived at the conclusion that the man with the snake tattoo was one of the men in the van and that it was best to give that duo the slip sooner rather than later. Although Luther had told her nothing specific on the phone the previous night, he’d made it clear that what happened at the Veblen Hotel was part of something far bigger and that merely because he had been doing what any good officer of the law ought to be doing, not only he but also his family were in imminent danger. He had anticipated some smaller threat as early as Friday, when that loathsome Booth Hendrickson came to the house. And it was now three nights since, on Sunday, he had risked taking two disposable phones from the evidence locker, so that they could avoid wiretaps yet stay in touch while he was in Kentucky. Rebecca had made the mistake of leaving the Buick unattended while she and Jolie were in the bank, which was no doubt when a battery-powered transmitter had been planted on the vehicle. There was no way to find the device and remove it while the men in the van watched. When Luther phoned her in two hours, he would surely tell her to forget the Buick and leave the two thugs running surveillance on an abandoned car. No need to wait for him to call or to call him now.
“Applied Platonism,” Rebecca said, “tells me that we need to scoot.”
They had not unpacked before going to dinner. They helped each other through the darkness, bumping against furniture in a graceless urgency that under other circumstances would have inspired giggling, and retrieved their coats from the bed and located their luggage in the alcove outside the bathroom. With two suitcases and a makeup case, they eased out the door into the corridor.
The rooms on the farther side of the hall looked out onto a southside parking lot different from the one to the north in which they had left the Buick. Wordless and impatient, they rode the slow elevator to the ground floor. They left the building by a south door and walked through three rows of parked vehicles toward the street, their breath in rapid cadence pluming, the night cold and all the city sounds shrill and brittle.
The motor inn stood in a busy commercial area, and they kept the building between them and the men in the van as they made their way to a street. Along a sidewalk, past retail shops, some open and others closed, past bars and restaurants from a few of which came live music of an insistent gaiety without real gladness, mother and daughter went in search of another place to stay the night.
Rebecca was relieved they had taken the initiative. But on Jolie’s face and surely on her own was written the expectation that safety and a pla
ce to stay were different things, the latter easy to find, the former elusive.
15
* * *
Hendrickson in the bunker of the Fates, at all times striking a confident and commanding pose, although he periodically feels as if something is sliding loose inside his chest and at all times as if he is poised on a wire above the upturned faces of everyone he has ever known, while they wait in gleeful expectation of his fall…
Twenty minutes earlier, the security technician tasked with enhancing the image of Luther Tillman’s parked car clarified the license-plate number. The Chevrolet is a rental obtained from a concession at the Louisville airport on Monday.
Now the tech swivels in his workstation chair and says to Hendrickson, “According to the rental agency, sir, the Chevy was returned to the airport just a short while ago—at five-thirty.”
Airports are monitored by more cameras per cubic foot than any other facilities in the country. Hendrickson tells the tech how to backdoor the NSA’s video coordination program and get an image of whoever dropped off that car in Louisville.
Jane Hawk had taken the precaution of parking her car in a residential neighborhood, a block and a half from the main drag in Iron Furnace, where she assumed there was no camera.
By following multicamera video of her when she departed the tavern with the sheriff, a second technician is able to track her and identify her vehicle as a black Ford Escape. When she drives to Lakeview Road and Tillman follows her in his rental, her license plate is clear as she passes through a well-lighted intersection.
Hendrickson considers putting a description of the car and its license-plate number on the National Crime Information Center’s network, flashing it to every law-enforcement agency in the country, but he hesitates. He suspects the bitch knows how to tap the NCIC without flagging herself, that from time to time she checks to learn if they have any additional crucial information about her. If she discovers they know her car and the plate number, she’ll switch the tags—which are probably stolen—for another stolen pair, and as soon as she can, she’ll dump the Ford Escape.