The Whispering Room

by Dean Koontz

  Nationwide, police cruisers and other government vehicles equipped with 360-degree license-plate-scanning systems collect numbers from vehicles around them—parked and in motion—minute by minute, and transmit those readings to regional archives around the clock. The NSA maintains the central archive for all these systems. If at any time since they left Iron Furnace the Ford Escape or the rental Chevy has been scanned, the NSA program will be able to tell him where and when.

  Although no less on edge than before, Hendrickson tells himself that it is a great time to be alive for men like him, when they have the ability, legally or otherwise, to gaze on the world with the infinite eyes of a god.

  16

  * * *

  Sitting bundled in a chilly van because the exhaust vapor might draw attention to them, having eaten cold takeout, breathing stale air redolent of garlic and Beedle’s body odor and his occasional cigarette…

  Clandestine work in the service of a worthy ideal, when the righteousness of the mission is more important than anything the laws of man and nature forbid, when one has a license to kill and will do so not for love of country, like James Bond, but for a much greater cause, like the transformation of the world into a far less chaotic place and the preservation of the environment by strictly controlling the destructive impulses of humanity…Well, to most people, such work seems meaningful, rich with romance and mystery and adventure, a thrill a minute.

  Hassan Zaghari, who yearns for the new world coming and who has killed for it on numerous occasions, who has known great adventure, who understands the concept of romance but prefers impersonal sex, who sees ignorance and confusion everywhere in the world but no mystery, wishes that his work were more like the general public’s perception of it. In the movies, all is glamour. The hero never must endure a partner who is an odor machine like Kernan Beedle, and guys on stakeout never have to urinate behind a dumpster on a freezing night in order to remain close to their vehicle if they suddenly need to roll.

  At the moment, Beedle slouches behind the steering wheel, talking nonstop about something in which Hassan has zero interest, while Hassan sits with his laptop in the position for which it’s named. He has hacked the computer system at the headquarters of the corporation that owns this motor inn and hundreds of others—their HQ is in the enviable climate of Orlando, Florida—and has routed back to the computer in this Rockford unit, where he now monitors their electronic-key system.

  Many hotels and motor inns have long ago replaced basic locksets with electronic locks and have issued magnetic key cards instead of traditional keys, because this allows them to change the lock combination on a room each time a new guest checks in. The upgraded key-card program at this establishment monitors every use of every card and every opening and closing of every door to a guest room, ostensibly to be alerted if an illegal electronic device other than a card is used to disengage a lock—a card has an electronic signature different from that of any device favored by burglars—and for other security reasons.

  On Hassan’s laptop screen, rows of numbered squares represent guest rooms in the motor inn. A red square signifies a locked door. When a key card is used, the square turns green until the door is closed and locks again automatically. A blue square indicates a door that has been opened from inside by an exiting guest, and it remains blue until the door closes and locks, whereupon it turns red again.

  In the motor inn’s computerized registry, Rebecca Tillman’s name is linked to Room 212.

  When mother and daughter return from dinner in the restaurant, the red square signifying 212 turns green…and then red.

  “They’re back,” Hassan says.

  Beedle interrupts himself in the middle of expounding on whatever tedious issue currently fascinates him. “Why no lights?”

  The women’s second-floor room is on this side of the building, pretty much directly above where they parked the ancient Buick station wagon. They have two windows, and both remain dark.

  After half a minute, Beedle says, “Something isn’t right.”

  The van is well back from the building, in the comparatively shadowed area between pools of light from two parking-lot lamps.

  Hassan picks up a pair of binoculars from the seat beside him and focuses on one of 212’s windows, then on the other.

  “They’ve parted the drapes in the dark,” he says. “One face above the other, looking out.”

  “At us?” Beedle wonders.

  “At something.”

  A Range Rover cruises toward them, past them, washing the van with its headlights, and a moment later the drapes at the window in 212 fall shut.

  “I think they saw us,” Hassan says.

  “How would they know even to look for us?”

  “I should have gone in there for takeout,” Hassan says. “Maybe one of them saw you this morning in the bank.”

  “Who could know we’d cross paths?”

  Hassan had wanted to do the food run; but Beedle didn’t trust anyone to order dinner for him.

  As is often the case, Beedle now feels it necessary to announce the obvious. “The room’s still dark.”

  Hassan puts down the binoculars and studies the display of red squares on the laptop screen.

  “They’re doing something in the dark,” says Beedle.

  After a minute, the square signifying room 212 turns from red to blue.

  Able to view the screen from an angle, seeing this development, Beedle says, “They’re leaving the room.”

  The blue square goes red, and Beedle starts the van’s engine.

  Closing the laptop, putting it aside, opening his door, Hassan says, “I don’t think they’ll go for the Buick. They’ll probably split from the other side of the building. I’ll tail them on foot.”

  “I’ll keep my phone on,” Beedle says.

  With a faint note of exasperation that he can’t repress, Hassan says, “Yes, that would be the way to do it.”

  He gets out into the bitter night and hurries toward the motor inn, eyes watering as the icy air prickles them. The two women have never seen him before. He is experienced in the craft of tailing suspects on foot while remaining invisible to them. He hates the freezing cold. He was born for warmth. But a March night in Rockford is the least of the things he has endured to help bring to fruition the better world in which people like this mother and daughter will know their place and will keep to it or otherwise forfeit their existence.

  17

  * * *

  In Ardmore, Oklahoma, in the motel room dimly lighted by one lamp draped with a towel, where the four exhausted young girls lay as stone-still as if sedated, Jane hoped for dreamless sleep. But alone on the rollaway bed, she melted into worlds conjured by the unconscious. She wandered a menacing nightscape of city streets, searching for Nick, every resident a hostile somnambulant figure of shadowy substance. And then she was in an infinite factory and could not find her way out of a maze of abandoned machinery and decades of trash from which Randall Larkin was repeatedly resurrected and borne toward her on a tide of rats. And then a sniper on a hilltop fired down into a plain across which a great herd of horses stampeded, the shot animals screaming when wounded and tumbling in ghastly mists of blood and billowing dust, Jane on foot among the frantic rush of horses, searching for something in the tumult, the horses having become ponies, Exmoor ponies, and ahead of her came a shape upon the hoof-beaten ground, the shape of some rider shot from the saddle and fallen and trampled and rendered ragged, and she was almost able to identify the torn and broken rider seen through the dust, was almost able to see him, approaching through the chaos, approaching the rider, perpetually approaching….

  18

  * * *

  Hendrickson revels in the data from the NSA.

  West. The vicious bitch and the yokel sheriff went south from Iron Furnace into Tennessee late Tuesday and then turned west. At 2:28:14 A.M. Wednesday, nine miles east of Memphis, an eastbound Tennessee Highway Patrol car had read the front plates of the
Ford Escape in the westbound lanes. At 2:28:17, it read the plates of the Chevy close behind the Ford.

  The next catch is southwest of Little Rock. An Arkansas Highway Patrol car, entering Interstate 30, automatically scanned the front plates of the Ford Escape on the adjacent exit ramp to Hot Springs at 4:36:24 A.M. Wednesday, and the rental Chevy three seconds later.

  It is a mystery to Hendrickson how Hawk and Tillman know each other and why they hooked up in Iron Furnace. Now a new mystery weaves its web with the first one: What do they want in Hot Springs or someplace beyond; are they gone to ground there, or are they traveling henceforth off the interstates?

  In cities and major suburbs and on interstate highways, the automatic license-reading program is better established than it is in rural areas on smaller federal, state, and county roads. Therefore, this promising pursuit leads to sudden disappointment when the security technician reports that no additional reading of the Ford’s license plate has occurred since the one at Hot Springs, Arkansas, more than sixteen hours earlier.

  Two readings of the rental Chevy took place subsequent to Hot Springs. The first at 8:06 A.M. where I-30 melded with I-40 on the perimeter of Little Rock. The second at 2:25 P.M. three miles north of Nashville on Interstate 65. Somebody had been driving it back to the Louisville airport, where it had been returned just a little while ago, at five-thirty.

  And now the third technician, seeking an airport-video image of the person who returned the car to Louisville, strikes the jackpot. Except that the man on the monitor, shown at the rental-return lot, is white rather than black, not Luther Tillman. Considering his tangled mane of hair and mountain-man beard and sunglasses, not enough of him is visible to bother processing him with facial-recognition software. On the screen, he walks out of camera range. There is no video of the vehicle in which he might have departed.

  Hendrickson is wrought by rough emotions, anger foremost among them, and by a sense that people he relies on have failed him, not least of all Huey Darnell up there in Minnesota.

  Stepping away from the security technicians and Stacia O’Dell, who remain accessed and entirely in his control as they wait for further instructions, Hendrickson calls Huey’s iPhone.

  “Darnell,” says Darnell.

  “It’s me. Where are you?”

  “Running surveillance on Tillman.”

  “The sheriff?”

  “Yeah. Luther Tillman.”

  “Where is he?” Hendrickson asks.

  “In his house. His wife and daughter, though—they left town in Deputy Stassen’s old Buick wagon. Hassan Zaghari and Kernan Beedle are on the case, have them under watch at a motel in Rockford.”

  “Rockford where?” Hendrickson asks.

  “Illinois. They drove a long day to get there. We don’t know why Rockford.”

  “Maybe they’re going to meet Luther.”

  “Well, but he’s right here in his house.”

  “Is that so?”

  Darnell is silent. Then: “He was earlier.”

  “Until he flew to Kentucky on Monday. This is Wednesday. So I guess, yes, he was there earlier. Two days earlier.”

  Huey Darnell chooses silence again.

  “You know what I want you to do, Darnell?”

  “I guess I should go into the house here.”

  “Brilliant. You go into the house there, and you take the place apart, top to bottom. You look for anything that explains why Luther went to Iron Furnace, Kentucky. You got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You look for anything that indicates he’s ever interacted with Jane Hawk, ever knew her, or knew someone else who knew her. You know who Jane Hawk is?”

  “Yes, sir. Everybody knows.”

  “You look for anything else that seems curious. You don’t sleep until you’ve found something that helps me.”

  “What if there’s nothing to find, I come up empty?”

  “That’s not an option,” Hendrickson says.

  “The wife and daughter left lights on all through the house.”

  “So?”

  “Well, so it looked like someone was there now it’s dark.”

  “Are you making an excuse for yourself?”

  “No, sir. Just sayin’.”

  Hendrickson terminates the call and stands fuming. He wants to believe every Arcadian is at least a cut above the hoi polloi. But just because a man’s ideology is correct doesn’t mean he has what it takes to deserve the better world he envisions. Soon Huey Darnell will have to be injected with the control mechanism used for those on the Hamlet list and sent away somewhere to kill himself.

  Now Hendrickson returns to the security technicians waiting with Stacia O’Dell, and he instructs them to back out of the sites they have illegally hacked at his direction. Then he reminds them that they are to remember only that they have been seeking to learn where Martin Moses, the corporate-espionage specialist, went after he left the resort the previous day.

  That done, he closes down access to their control programs by saying, “Auf Wiedersehen.”

  “Good-bye,” they say in unison and return to their regular security duties as if nothing unusual has occurred.

  Stacia O’Dell says, “Is there somewhere more you wish to go, Mr. Congrieve?”

  She has worked long past her usual quitting time, but there is something more he needs before she takes him back to the helicopter still waiting on the outskirts of town. “Let’s go to your office, Ms. O’Dell.”

  The night concierge has his own office. In Ms. O’Dell’s suite, the reception lounge is dark, her assistant gone for the day.

  They proceed into her office, where Hendrickson closes the door and says, “Play Manchurian with me.”

  “All right,” she says, and is again accessed.

  “Stand right there,” he directs, “and take off your clothes.”

  Although her face remains placid, perhaps the equivalent of a frown passes through her eyes, but then she begins by unbuttoning her blouse.

  Booth Hendrickson sits in one of the plush chairs for visitors. With his smartphone, he places a call to the after-hours number of Marshall Ackerman, a director of the nonprofit Volunteers for a Better Tomorrow, which is one of D. J. Michael’s projects.

  When Ackerman answers, Hendrickson explains the situation with the Ford Escape, last seen in Hot Springs. “If they left those eight kids somewhere in Arkansas, she and Tillman need only one vehicle now. She’s probably still driving the Ford. Put somebody inside the NSA program to monitor it every ten minutes. The moment there’s a fresh scan of this California plate number”—he repeated it from memory—“let me know at once.”

  “Consider it done. You heard what happened last Friday at the warehouse where she wasted Larkin?” Ackerman asked.

  “She skipped before you got there.”

  “That’s the thumbnail. The bitch left a firebomb on a timer, tried to torch us, the place crawling with crazed rats.”

  “Yes, I heard that, too.”

  Ackerman says, “I ever get my hands on her, I’ll feed her a rat and then set her on fire, I swear to hell.”

  “No one would object,” Hendrickson assures him. He terminates the call and speaks impatiently to Stacia O’Dell. “No, everything off. Everything. Completely naked.”

  Even though she is accessed, her embarrassment is evident. But she obeys.

  Hendrickson is somewhat surprised by his actions here. He has disdain for women who are not of his station, and his affairs tend to be with those one step above him on the social ladder. Even before being injected with a command mechanism, Stacia ranked below him in any class system worthy of observance, a middle-class striver lacking the intelligence and taste to rise above her beginnings. Now that she is one of the adjusted people, she is of the lowest caste, one step above a mere animal and at least one step below an ordinary slave. He ought to feel unclean as he remains seated and directs her to kneel before him, as she leans in to service him, as she does what he command
s. But this has been a day of frustration, and he is too tense to make the return trip to D.C. without this release.

  To him, Stacia is a primitive, almost another species, and this act is the closest thing to a transgression that he has the capacity to imagine. This is different from the girls of Aspasia, who are exquisitely designed and groomed fantasies with no remembered past and no future; in their biographical and intellectual stasis, they fit nowhere in the class structure; they are so deliciously unreal in their perfection and in their submissiveness that they might as well have stepped out of a wet dream. But Stacia has a past and a future, if one with severe limits, and when she’s not being actively controlled, she thinks and feels. He can command her, as he can any Aspasia girl, but not with the certainty that absolute submission will always be given. Although unlikely, there is always the remote possibility that a primitive like Stacia could bite, which thrills Hendrickson.

  19

  * * *

  In the two king-size beds, the four boys lay as oblivious to the world as if this were the first sleep of their lives, as if thousands of nights of unpaid slumber must now be accounted and rectified before morning.

  Luther was drawn toward the rollaway as though it was the most appealing bed he’d ever encountered. He would already have been deep in sleep if he hadn’t needed to call Rebecca at nine o’clock.

  He went into the bathroom, so as not to disturb the children. He closed the lid of the toilet and sat down. With his disposable phone, he called her disposable and soon learned that Rob Stassen’s Buick had gotten them to Rockford, but not with the anonymity they wanted. An hour and a half earlier, they checked in to an older hotel, a few blocks from where they abandoned the station wagon.