by Dean Koontz
She spent only a few minutes in the library and from there drove three hours to Yuma, Arizona, where she stayed the night.
At eleven o’clock Sunday morning, she arrived in San Diego and used a burner phone to call the number Otis Faucheur had given her.
When a man answered, Jane did not identify herself. “I believe you’ve been expecting me to call since Wednesday.”
“When would you like to meet?”
“At your earliest convenience.”
“Two o’clock.” He gave her an address in La Jolla.
One of the toniest neighborhoods of San Diego, La Jolla was a graceful community of tree-lined streets and interesting shops. At the upper end, residences there could cost eight figures.
Wilson Faucheur’s house was worth a mid-seven-figure price, perhaps five thousand square feet of soft contemporary architecture. It stood on a terraced hill, not part of the ultraexpensive front row but on the third street from the ocean.
When she drove by, she saw nothing suspicious. She parked the Explorer Sport on a parallel street and walked back to the house.
Although Otis Faucheur had made it clear that he would have her killed if she ever returned to his compound in that Arkansas hollow, she had little concern that she would be at risk in his son’s house. By Otis’s way of thinking, she and he were exploiters of weaknesses in the system, allies to a degree, though she must remember that he was part of the ruling class because he bribed politicians, while she was a true outsider. In a crunch, he would deem her expendable.
She rang the bell, and the man who answered was quite different from his father. Tall, rangy, with thick, dark hair. His features were too sharp to be handsome, but he was attractive, about forty.
Closing the door behind her, he said, “My wife wants no part of this. She’s out till five o’clock. You have to be gone before then.”
“Understood.”
“My dad told me who you are. If you hadn’t cleared my brother Dozier on that case, there’s no way in hell I’d do this.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“Even so, you’re such poison now, I wonder if Dad is losing it, getting sentimental in his old age.”
“I assure you, he’s about as sentimental as a sledgehammer.”
The man’s features grew sharper, like a totem-pole visage shaped by a hatchet. “Is that supposed to be funny?”
“What it’s supposed to be is an accurate assessment. Look, the less we spar with each other, the quicker I’ll be gone.”
“That’s something, anyway.”
He led her through a house predominantly white with soft-gray accents, sleek modern furniture, and abstract art as soulless as chains of binary code laid down on paper by a computer.
His spacious home office was on the lowest of three floors. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, the homes on the lower two streets shelved to the ocean, which appeared to have been marshaled with the sky to complement the décor of this house: under a medium-gray heavens, dark-gray water checkered with low whitecaps.
The walls were hung with framed renderings of some of Wilson Faucheur’s projects. He didn’t build one home at a time but twenty-story condominiums, office towers, hotels, and government buildings. He favored architects who added flair in layers over what were, in essence, designs reminiscent of Soviet-era apartment blocks.
Two long tables each held a computer, printer, scanner, books, and multiple ring binders. Between them a five-foot-wide work run allowed Faucheur to swivel his office chair away from either table and roll to the other in one swift motion.
He provided a second chair for Jane, and they sat before a computer. “So there’s a building, you want to know the guts of it.”
“Can you spoof this, cover your tracks?”
His icy stare made his words superfluous. “What am I getting into?”
“Nothing serious, if you’re good at misdirection.”
After a silence during which he might have considered denying his father’s request, he said, “I can ricochet through a couple offshore addresses. If necessary later, they can be folded up as though they never existed.”
“Wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Jane said.
She gave him the location of the ten-story building that would be the end of her quest and possibly the end of her.
When Faucheur had established his roundabout approach, he started with Google Street View. The target structure had a Moderne feel: soft rounded corners, pale limestone, stainless-steel doors and window frames and decorative elements. Over the front entrance in brushed-steel letters were the words FAR HORIZONS.
The top three floors were recessed about fifteen feet from the lower floors to allow wraparound balconies. The building stood at the apex of its street in an area where most structures were six stories or lower, so the top three floors would have stunning views.
“It’s in an eclectic neighborhood, but just the same it’s an unusual mixed-use building,” Faucheur said. “The three uppermost floors are obviously residential. But if that’s a company name at the entrance, then the lower seven are business offices. And each of the wraparound balconies seems to flow without interruption, so all the apartments at each level share one continuous-view deck, which is seriously bad design.”
Jane said, “Only one apartment on the ninth floor. None on the eighth or tenth. Those floors are security barriers for the ninth.”
That wintry stare again. This time he didn’t bother with words.
If Jane didn’t tell him, he’d research the building’s history after she left. “The name David James Michael mean anything to you?”
“Damn.”
“The ninth floor is where he lives when he’s in San Francisco.”
“And you want to find a way past his security.”
“I’m not going past it. I’m going through it.”
“To do what?”
“Video his confession to a series of capital crimes that will blow up his empire and get him the death penalty.”
Faucheur swiveled toward the big windows and stared at the sea, as if hoping that the captain of the Ship of Wisdom would semaphore advice to him.
Jane said, “I already have most of what I need. There are just a few things I have to learn.”
“Michael is a big environmentalist. I guess you know that.”
“I hear he cares.”
“Yeah, he cares. He cares about D. J. Michael.”
“Gives a lot of money.”
“And gets back more. The sonofabitch uses his eco-movement friends to sabotage the projects of his competitors in the permit stage. A few years go by, another company builds something almost the same as what was rejected—and through one back door or another, he has a piece of it, if not all of it.”
“You’re one of the ones he screwed over, huh?”
Faucheur turned away from the sea and met her eyes. “What do you need to know?”
“Four elevators,“ she said, repeating what Randall Larkin had told her. “Three go no higher than the seventh floor. The fourth serves floors eight through ten, nothing below.”
“You need a special key to unlock it?”
“Yeah. And once in the car,” she said, “you have to submit to a retinal scan and be matched to those on an approved list. If you’re trying to fake it, the car locks down and holds you for the police.”
“So the elevators are no good for you.”
“Then there are two stairs, one at each end of the building.”
He nodded. “According to fire code.”
“But they only go to the seventh floor.”
“That would never pass the building department,” Faucheur said. “Not even for D. J. Michael.”
“I’ve been told there’s a hidden staircase. Would the building code allow that?”
“If it was a legit part of an architectural security system. You’ve got your electronic system, and sometimes for very high-end units, you also have your architectural system.”
&nbs
p; “You mean like a panic room.”
“Panic room, yeah, and sometimes a secret escape route from the building, maybe into the basement. Or even vertical, then horizontal into the basement of the building next door, and out from there.”
“Would a panic room or hidden stairwell be in the plans filed with the city?”
“No.” He turned his attention to the Google Street View on the monitor, his expression less severe. He seemed to be in the grip of a kind of boyish enthusiasm. “But usually they require you to walk the police through it after construction, so the cops will know your hidden back door in a hostage situation. A lot of the time, though, there’s no compliance.”
“The guy who told me all the rest…he knew there’s a hidden stairwell, but he didn’t know where. Can you find it?”
He pressed the fingertips of his right hand to the Street View on the screen, as if he could solve the puzzle by a psychic touch. “Every building has voids, awkward spaces that don’t have any use in the general floor plan. They get walled off, you don’t even know they exist. They’re usually small, and they’re never contiguous through an entire structure. If you know how to read blueprints and you can identify a void running top to bottom or end to end, that’ll be the hidden stairs or the hidden passage.”
“Can you access the blueprints in the city building department? I assume they require the builder to file electronic plans.”
He shook his head. “If possible, that’s not how you want to do it. The city databases, their whole system, it’s government garbage. It’ll bog us down, make us crazy. There’s another way.”
“Then you’ll get me what I need?”
He sat back in his chair and spun once in a full circle and smiled at her. “If yesterday anyone told me I’d have a chance to help bring down D. J. Michael, I’d have given my left nut for the opportunity.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Jane said.
18
* * *
Wilson called his wife and told her not to come home until six o’clock. He and Jane were going to need more than the three hours that he had allotted.
There was a coffeemaker in his home office, and Jane brewed a strong pot. They both took it black and sugarless.
Wilson produced a plate of his wife’s chocolate-drop-lemon cookies. Jane wasn’t a cookie person, but this seemed like a cookie moment if ever there was one, and they were delicious.
Rather than hack the San Francisco building department’s archives, Wilson went to a website called Emporis, which styled itself as a provider of construction data on buildings of “high public and economic value.” From there he was directed to the company that had put up the building in question and to all the principal subcontractors that the primary contractor had employed.
“D.J. hired the best,” Wilson said, “and it’s not a company he’s got a piece of, as far as I know.”
The contractor maintained electronic archives, and Wilson was confident of getting into them in mere minutes, because he had spent hours hacking them in the past and had used a Trojan to set up a back door to allow easy access in the future.
“I’ve bid against them,” he told Jane. “They shave costs in ways that kill their competitors. I needed to know how.” He seemed to read her expression and smiled ruefully. “Yeah, I guess I didn’t fall as far from the tree of Otis as I sometimes like to think.”
Beyond the wall of glass, the loom of the sky gradually wove darker skeins into the overcast as the planet turned away from the sun, and the sea darkled with a reflection of the clouds.
“The building has three stories of underground parking. Of the aboveground floors, the first seven encompass one hundred and twelve thousand square feet of office space. Because of the wraparound balcony, the three upper floors total a little more than twenty-seven thousand.”
After much scanning and study of blueprints, Wilson found a contiguous series of voids six or seven feet square, dead center on the south wall, running all the way from the roof to the first of three levels of subterranean parking.
“It might be a spiral staircase,” he said, “although it’s just large enough for a switchback with small landings.”
“How is it accessed?”
“It appears to terminate behind a supply closet of some kind. My best guess is the closet will be lined with storage shelves, and a hidden lever will swing one set of shelves out of the way.”
“Secret door.”
“Totally Indiana Jones,” he said.
“There’ll be an alarm on the door. Any way I could foil it?”
“If the door’s properly hidden, you wouldn’t want an alarm on it. An alarm ties your architectural security to your electronic security, so if a really brilliant black-hat hacker gets in the latter, he can also find the former. Then your secret escape route isn’t secret anymore.”
“Cameras in there?”
“If you can monitor the hidden stairwell through security cameras, a black-hat guy can monitor it, too, and see where you are in the middle of your escape. A bolt-hole or a secret passageway is far more likely to remain secret if it’s kept simple. You design it so it can’t be found, at least not casually, so then the only one who’s ever going to use it is the guy who feels he needs it in the first place.”
With dusk, a brisk breeze came off the water and up the hill, and palm fronds tossed as if the trees lamented the passing of the light.
“What I believe,” Jane said, “what I’ve been told, is that I can get into either the eighth or the tenth floor from those stairs, but not into the ninth. The door at the ninth would have to be blown down with a packet of C-4. Kind of difficult to arrive stealthily after that.”
“D. J. Michael lives on the ninth, huh? You said the eighth and tenth are security barriers. What does that mean, exactly?”
“You don’t want to know. I intend to go in at the eighth floor. If I make it through there alive, I need a way to get up to the ninth from the eighth. Some way he won’t be expecting.”
Wilson regarded her in silence for a long moment. “Everything about you on the news is bullshit, isn’t it?”
“Most of it. I have had to kill some people in self-defense. On the news, they never call it self-defense.”
“What the hell is all this really about?” He held up one hand to silence himself. “Yeah, okay—I don’t want to know.” He swung back to the screen. “Let’s see if we can find you what you need.”
19
* * *
By Monday afternoon, Jane had acquired two new pistols from John and Judy White, who used the names Pete and Lois Jones, the Syrian refugees who had likely never seen Syria, who lived in the Reseda house with the many lawn gnomes, proud grandparents of nonexistent grandchildren. The guns were polymer-frame Heckler & Koch .45 Compacts carrying nine-round magazines with semistaggered ammo stacks that allowed for a comfortable grip. They were fitted with sound suppressors. She also acquired spare magazines, boxes of ammunition, and a new double-carry shoulder rig featuring holsters with swivel connectors and a suede harness. Although it was possible to overarm and lose freedom of movement, she also purchased a Gould & Goodrich gun belt with a Velcro attachment system for securing various items, as well as a few toys to hang from it.
Instead of a too-small pink sweat suit, the zaftig Lois wore a too-small purple number. Yellow instead of green fingernail polish. The six rings with huge diamonds had given birth to a seventh.
Before she left, standing on the threshold, Jane couldn’t resist saying, “Bernie Riggowitz of Elegant Weave says you sell first-class wigs.”
“Russian hair,” Lois said between drags on her cigarette.
“Is that right?”
“Is best hair in world.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Except don’t use Chernobyl hair.”
“Because of the accident at the nuclear-power plant?”
Lois issued a plume of smoke. She pinched a fleck of something from her tongue and examined it
as she said, “Was no accident. Was not just power plant.”
The woman’s knowing demeanor suggested that she was not merely repeating a tabloid-newspaper fantasy.
“If not just a power plant and not an accident—then what?”
The black eyes narrowed, and in them glimmered the suggestion of a soul so hard and cold that a garish sweat suit and flamboyant nail polish and an excess of rings could no longer lend her even a slightly comic air. “Chernobyl nothing to you. Go. Go where you go. You want to die, so go die.” She closed the door in Jane’s face.
20
* * *
Monday night. Ten o’clock. Jane settled in a motel in greater San Francisco, in a district that hadn’t been seedy just ten years earlier but that now lay in decline. Clutching bags and bundles of possessions with mostly imaginary value, the multitudes of homeless—the alcoholics and the addicts and the mentally deranged, as well as those who were just the sane and sober poor—caulked the darkened doorways of shuttered stores, the cracks and crevices of shrubbery in a nearby pocket park, the concavities between dumpsters in the alleyways. Sirens swelled and faded in the festering night, as did shrill laughter. Someone drunkenly sang the old Jim Croce song “Time in a Bottle,” and suddenly stopped as if silenced by a blow.
Having decided to lie down fully dressed, near eleven o’clock Jane was brought off the bed by the crying of a child. It was a low, persistent sound, not petulant bawling but an expression of misery and settled sorrow that some adult should have in time soothed away with words and a loving touch, but the weeping did not cease.
At first, she thought the sound came from a room adjacent to hers. When she listened at the shared walls both to the west and east, that didn’t seem to be the case.
She paced, increasingly restless, until at last she shrugged into the single-holster shoulder rig, then into a sport coat. With the Colt concealed, she left her room and stood on the cracked and stained concrete walk that served the long wing of shabby rooms that were like a cellblock for those who had never been convicted of their crimes and chose to self-imprison.