The Whispering Room

by Dean Koontz

  Alarmed that they had been followed but proud of the initiative with which they had shaken off their surveillance, Luther said, “How will you get to Chicago in time tomorrow?”

  Rebecca said, “I don’t like the bus terminal or train station.”

  “I don’t like them, either.”

  “I fibbed to Robbie Stassen, said I was going to Madison to move Aunt Tandy in with Mom. So I thought…I didn’t want to call Mom for help, that might be too obvious. But whoever these people are, they can’t have every phone tapped, can they? So I called Aunt Tandy. Is that okay?”

  “I think so. You had to do something.”

  “I told her Jolie and I are in Rockford, my Toyota went kaput, could she loan me a car. She has two, never sold Uncle Calvin’s.”

  Just across the border in Wisconsin, Madison was no more than sixty miles from Rockford.

  Luther said, “You didn’t tell her why you’re in Rockford?”

  “I made up a story. Turns out Aunt Tandy has a boyfriend.”

  “What is she—eighty?”

  “A young seventy-nine. The boyfriend is seventy. She’s a cradle robber. She’s driving Calvin’s Dodge. The boyfriend’s following in her car, so he can take her home. They’ll be here in half an hour.”

  Luther said, “You’re amazing, how you’re handling all this.”

  “You should realize, being married to a wild man like you has given me nerves of steel.”

  He smiled. “I am a tough case to handle.”

  “You’ll never know how tough, sugar. So Chicago tomorrow and then what? Where do we go from there? Where are you?”

  “On the move. I’ll know by tomorrow night where I’ll be next.”

  “I need to see you, Luther.”

  “Me, too. More than anything. I love you. Remember that place we went that time on holiday, where most likely Twyla was conceived?”

  “It’s unforgettable.”

  “Go there tomorrow. You’ve got my number, I’ve got yours, but if anything goes wrong, I’ll know where to find you. How’s Jolie?”

  “She’s a natural-born fugitive. No posse is ever going to track her down. She wants to talk to you.”

  “Daddy?” Jolie said when she took the phone.

  “Hi, candygirl.”

  “You haven’t called me that in forever.”

  “No offense meant.”

  “None taken. Daddy, tell me straight, is it all falling apart?”

  “Is what falling apart, sweetheart?”

  “The country, the world, civilization, the human experiment.”

  “Everything’s always falling apart, Jolie, but at the same time it’s always being rebuilt.”

  “Excuse me, but that is a load of cow pies. You’re better than that, Daddy.”

  “You’re right. Listen, it’s not all falling apart. There’s an evil thing going on, and like all evil things, it’s going to end badly for the people behind it.”

  “Are we going to be okay? You and Mom and me and Twyla?”

  The girl was too smart to be reassured by platitudes. “All I can say, Jolie, is I’ll do everything I can to be sure we’re okay.”

  “Good. Okay. That’s all I wanted to hear. I love you, Daddy.”

  “I love you, too, Jolie.”

  After the call ended, even as tired as he was, Luther did not go at once to bed. He stood at the sink, gazing at his reflection but not seeing himself, seeing instead Rebecca and Twyla and Jolie, their faces risen vividly in memory as if actually materializing in the mirror, conjured there by the intensity of his love. He said the briefest prayer that heaven’s protection would be granted to these three precious women, for he was not confident that doing everything he could do for them would be enough.

  20

  * * *

  Three one-hundred-dollar bills are sufficient to persuade the bellman to bring Hassan Zaghari and Kernan Beedle to the room next door to the one in which Rebecca and Jolie Tillman are ensconced for the night. They show him their Homeland Security ID simultaneous with offering the cash, but he seems to believe the identification only to the extent that it gives him an excuse to accept the money.

  His name is Jerry Hare, which quite appropriately rhymes with derriere, because the guy is a pain in that precise portion of the anatomy. To Hassan, Jerry Hare sounds like a cartoon character, and in fact he kind of looks like one: slightly buck teeth, a twitchy nose like a rabbit’s, whites of the eye that are mostly pink, and ears just about large enough to be used to pull him out of a top hat if he would fit in one.

  Nervous beyond reason, he returns fifteen minutes after leaving them to their business, then again fifteen minutes after that, each time to insist that he didn’t know they would be staying more than five minutes and to impress on them that it isn’t worth losing his job for three hundred dollars, whereupon he extorts a hundred more each time. He pretends that the front desk is likely to rent out this room at any moment, that another bellman might arrive with guests and their luggage, but of course a room in this two-star relic that is not rented by this hour of a Wednesday night will go unoccupied. His only saving grace is that he whispers and directs all of his complaints to Beedle, who remains at a suitable distance from Hassan.

  During all this rabbity angst, Hassan silently takes down a reproduction of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night in a faux-wood faux-gilded baroque frame totally wrong for the art, which hangs from two hooks on the wall between this room and the next. He gingerly removes one of the hooks and a large nail from which it is suspended. As quietly as possible, he inserts a long, slender spike mic into the nail hole and presses it deeper, deeper, until he feels the tip make contact with the inside of the wall of the adjacent hotel room. He puts the attached earpiece in his right ear and switches on the super-high-gain direct-coupled amplifier, which can provide a sound gain of up to one hundred thousand times the power of received vibrations.

  When the bellman makes a third visit, he wants another three hundred. Hassan turns off the amplifier long enough to whisper to Beedle, for the bellman’s benefit, “If this piece of shit won’t settle for one last hundred and shut up and wait, then kill him.”

  Producing the hundred, Beedle says to Jerry Hare, “You know, Uncle Sam is trillions in debt, Jerry, he doesn’t have bottomless pockets anymore.”

  If the bellman doesn’t believe the Homeland Security ID, he now takes seriously the death threat. As pale as Alice’s rabbit and just as nervous, he stands very still with his hands folded in front of him in what might be a posture of prayer, his eyes wide, nibbling at his lower lip with his protruding upper teeth.

  And so it is that Hassan is able to listen first to Rebecca and then Jolie as they speak with Luther Tillman. He can hear only one side of the telephone conversation, but he gets plenty of useful information from what the women say to the sheriff and what they say to each other after the call is concluded.

  Minutes later, from a corner of the ground-floor lobby, Hassan calls Huey Darnell in Minnesota to report their progress and receive instructions.

  Huey is curiously reluctant to provide guidance. “What do I know? Any direction on this should come from Hendrickson. Call him and see what he wants.”

  “Me call him?” Hassan says. “I don’t have his number.”

  “Why not?”

  “He gives it out on a need-to-know basis, doesn’t he?”

  “Well, now you need to know,” Huey says. “You have a pen and paper?”

  “No, but I’ve got a memory. Go ahead.” After he has the number, Hassan says, “You think I can call him now, this late?”

  “You can wait till Christmas if you think that’s best, but my opinion—which isn’t worth very damn much—is call him now.”

  After a hesitation, Hassan says, “Are you all right, Huey?”

  “I’m swell, Hassan. I’m peachy keen. I’m the tops, I’m the tower of Pisa. I’m the tops, I’m the Mona Lisa.”

  Hassan is silent for a moment. Then: “Well, okay, I
’ll call him now.”

  21

  * * *

  Many thousands of feet above the earth, where the atmosphere is too thin to sustain life, where a sky of clouds lies below and a sky of cold stars arcs above, where time in its cruel and relentless progress seems to apply only to the masses quarreling across the planet’s surface, in the cushioned comfort of the Gulfstream V jet, Booth Hendrickson enjoys a late dinner of capon served with style by a flight steward in the employ of the FBI but for this journey on loan to the Department of Justice. There is a superb side order of haricots verts and another of pasta alfredo. The white wine is properly chilled and crisp and so delicious that Hendrickson doesn’t ask the name of it, for fear that it will prove to be of an undistinguished label and therefore will disturb his sense of the proper order of things.

  A flight from Louisville to Washington is not usually long enough for one to enjoy a leisurely dinner with dessert followed by a carefully nurtured serving of forty-year-old port. However, while choppering to Louisville from Iron Furnace, Hendrickson arranged for the pilot to file a new flight plan that set a course to Washington by way of Atlanta, Georgia. If this unconventional route, filed so late, presents air-traffic-control problems, civilian air corridors can be cleared of commercial flights in order to accommodate an official engaged on urgent business for his nation.

  Between the entrée and the lemon tart with basil ice cream, as Hendrickson is enjoying the last of his wine, a call comes through from one Hassan Zaghari, whom he knows but who should not have his most private cell number. Huey Darnell again.

  Hassan succinctly explains the situation with Rebecca and Jolie Tillman and gives a concise account of the phone call placed to them by the Podunk sheriff. Then: “The aunt’s car will be in the hotel garage before long, sir. Beedle and I can tag a locater on it and follow them into Chicago as well as wherever they go from there.”

  “That won’t be necessary. You’ve told me all I need to know, which is where they’re headed in Chicago. From there, I’ll have a lock on them.”

  “Whatever you say, sir.”

  “You’ve done excellent work, Hassan.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I do have one more task for you after your long day—if you feel up to it.”

  “I’m always game, sir.”

  “I am familiar with your service record. You don’t hesitate to remove the enemies of progress with prejudice when necessary.”

  “When it’s necessary,” Hassan says, “that’s the last situation in which you want to hesitate.”

  “Beedle can drive back to Minnesota, but for you I’ll have a prop jet at the airport in Rockford to fly you to Milwaukee. An SUV will be waiting there. Drive flat out. You should get to Tillman’s house by one in the morning. Huey Darnell will be halfway through the job he’s doing…if he’s not only a quarter of the way.”

  “What job is that, sir?”

  “Going through the house with a fine-tooth comb, looking for anything that ties Tillman to Jane Hawk. When you get there, tell Darnell I’ve sent you to assist him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hassan, what is your opinion of Mr. Darnell? Don’t give me a candy-coated version. I know you to be a capable and discerning man. I only want the unvarnished truth.”

  “He drinks too much,” Hassan says.

  “To the point as usual. Now, once you’re in Tillman’s house, you will find a gun safe in his study. I have seen it myself. You will need to open the gun safe and take an appropriate handgun from it and remove from my side the thorn that is Huey Darnell. It would be best if you shot him in the back of the head twice, execution style. The story will be that Sheriff Tillman, now in league with Jane Hawk, killed one of Homeland Security’s finest men.”

  “Is the sheriff anywhere in that vicinity, sir?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Hassan. When necessary, there will be ample evidence found to prove his presence during the crime. But first I really do need to know if there’s anything in the house linking him to Hawk.”

  “If there is, I’ll find it, sir.”

  “I know that you will, Hassan.”

  Too discreet to approach while Hendrickson was on the phone, the steward now arrives with dessert and coffee. “Has everything been to your liking so far, sir?”

  “Marvelous,” Hendrickson assures him. “Superb. Tell me, a little while ago, did I detect the plane banking east-northeast?”

  “Yes, sir. At the moment, we’re approximately over Columbia, South Carolina.”

  “In the event that port is served too close to Washington, I assume the pilot can arrange to delay landing.”

  “Absolutely,” the steward says. “We can be put into the holding pattern for Reagan International if you wish.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  Alone now with his dessert and coffee, Hendrickson is amused to recall how disquieted—even distressed—he had been in the security bunker at the resort, when he discovered that the ubiquitous Jane Hawk had been in Iron Furnace. For a brief time, it seemed that she must be the embodiment of some preternatural power manifested here in the flesh to enforce some natural law at the expense of all things Arcadian, an avatar against whom no wiles or weapons could prevail.

  But now she has been tracked to Arkansas without her knowledge. Another automatic license-plate reading will come in soon, and he will be that much closer to knowing her destination. She is clever. However, no one is ever gifted enough to elude the many eyes of the modern state for long.

  She has made another big mistake in aligning herself with Sheriff Tillman. Jane is best alone, a she-wolf who knows how to travel by moonshadows even in daylight, a solitary predator who will be brought down much sooner due to the mistakes made by any pack she runs with than she would be by her own errors. Hendrickson now has a leash on the Tillman women, though they aren’t aware of it, and when they reunite with the sheriff, Hendrickson will have him as well. When he has the sheriff, he will soon thereafter have Jane Hawk.

  The disquiet he felt earlier was a transient emotion, evoked because he briefly lost his grasp on the undeniable truth that he and the Arcadians are not only on the right side of history but can rewrite all history before them. They will eliminate from the record of the past all of those facts and philosophies that they find inconvenient. As for the future, which is the history of things to come, they will write that as well, every day until forever. Now that he is again in possession of this truth, he is incapable of entertaining any misgivings.

  As medicines go, there is no curing combination more effective than an orgasm, a fine dinner, a superb wine, and the possession of a sleek jet aircraft with the world attendant below and firmly in the grasp of night.

  22

  * * *

  At 4:20 A.M. Thursday, after nine hours of restful sleep, Jane sat up on the rollaway and swung her legs out of bed, as instantly and fully awake as if roused by a gunshot. Incorporated in the last of her dreams had been a recognition of something that she had overlooked in that Kentucky village.

  Horrified by the condition into which the people of that town had fallen, in her vehement determination to extract the children from imprisonment, she had not considered that her usual precautions might not be sufficient to the strange circumstances of Iron Furnace. She had instructed one keeper of the children to destroy all the security video at the fake school. But what if the town itself was fitted out with more than a few traffic cams?

  Given the importance of its function as a conversion center, and considering that the Arcadians must be studying this experiment in total control in order to refine it for future application, Iron Furnace might be surveilled down to the square foot, around the clock. If cameras were everywhere, she hadn’t noticed an excess, but these days cameras of the highest quality were so small and could be so cunningly integrated into any setting that she might not have been aware of them.

  She had parked the Ford Escape on a quiet residential street where no camer
a should have caught her going to or from it. But what if they had identified her wheels? License-plate scanning was a rapidly growing automatic function of many police vehicles. She could travel anonymously only as long as they didn’t have a vehicle description and plate number.

  Having slept in jeans and sweater, she put on her shoes, her rig with pistol, and her sport coat. While the four girls remained deep in sleep, she let herself out of the room, onto the awning-covered dimly lighted promenade, and closed the door behind her.

  The Oklahoma night was chilly, clear, and quiet.

  She studied the parking lot, which was darker than she would have liked, the shadowed shapes of vehicles like a line of immense porcine creatures feeding at a trough.

  In the street, a delivery truck bearing a dairy’s name and logo passed slowly. Suspiciously slow? In an age when nothing was what it seemed, even a milk truck warranted sharp attention. She watched it out of sight and listened in expectation that its engine noise would stop receding and grow louder as it returned. But then the sound of it diminished beyond hearing.

  Nothing on the farther side of the street strummed any chord of danger from the harpstrings of her intuition, and she was willing to believe that the children were safe.

  She went to her nearby Ford and retrieved tools from under the front passenger seat: screwdriver, Phillips-head screwdriver, pliers, adjustable wrench, each instrument in a separate pocket in a folding chamois kit. A hammer was wrapped separately.

  Working quickly and quietly, hoping to avoid drawing attention, she unscrewed the front and back plates from the Ford. She put them in the car.

  Without plates, she would be at risk of drawing a patrolman’s attention. But as soon as they were out of Ardmore, they would exit I-35 and find a place where they were unobserved. She’d work on the front plate with pliers and hammer, to make it appear as if it had been crankled in some minor mishap, though her purpose would be to distort it so that any flat-reading scanner would be foiled. They could mix up some mud with which to splatter the back of the Ford, with emphasis on the rear plate. This deception might keep them safe until Sacket Ranch. But any lawman who by chance got a look at both the front and back plates would know the scam when he saw it.