The Whispering Room

by Dean Koontz

  She walked the motel end to end, and the wretched complaint of the child always rose elsewhere. Her attention focused on an old VW bus in a corner of the parking lot, its windows curtained. When she approached it, however, the child’s crying did not originate there.

  The weeping stopped. She waited for it to resume. No human sounds. Only mechanical noises near and far. As though the era of humanity had passed, leaving a city in which all the citizens were machines. The child remained silent.

  She returned to her room. She took off the coat and the shoulder rig.

  Travis. She wondered if in extreme circumstances a mother could hear her child crying hundreds of miles away.

  She thought of black-eyed Lois in Reseda, who had seemed like a Gypsy reading a fate in Jane’s eyes. You want to die, so go die.

  She desired only sleep now and justice soon. She didn’t want vodka, but sleep wouldn’t come without it. She mixed a drink.

  She didn’t want to die. Hell, no. What that woman had seen in her eyes was dread. A shrinking, anxious fear of what waited on the eighth floor of the Far Horizons building, what Randall Larkin had told her waited there. Neither the hard training at Quantico nor years of even harder experience could adequately prepare her for such a confrontation.

  Maybe the crying child whom she’d heard this night had been herself all those years earlier, when she had found her mother dead in the blood-clouded water of the bathtub.

  21

  * * *

  Parked across the street from Far Horizons, Jane Hawk watched employees coming to work Tuesday morning. Some carpooled. She noted the license-plate numbers of those who commuted alone.

  From Randall Larkin, she knew that each employee was assigned a numbered parking space and accessed the garage when a laser reader scanned a hologram sticker affixed to the windshield. Visitors had to arrange for admittance twenty-four hours in advance.

  Later at a library, using a public-access computer, she opened the DMV records with a police code, identified the owners of those vehicles, and obtained the addresses on their registration forms.

  By noon, she had two candidates. Sara Laura Shoen lived in a duplex in Sausalito and came to work over the Golden Gate Bridge. Henry Waldlock lived in Pacifica, south of the city. As best Jane could tell by their Facebook pages and other social media, neither was married or in a relationship. Both used matchmaking services.

  Because Henry had a single-family house that suggested greater privacy than a duplex, Jane drove to Pacifica to scout the place. The residence stood on a heavily landscaped, oversize lot and was the last house on the street, ideal for her intentions.

  After eating an early dinner at a restaurant, she returned to Henry’s neighborhood and parked the SUV two streets removed from the one on which he lived. Carrying her tote, she walked to his lovely Spanish-revival house and rang the bell at 5:15. No one answered.

  Prominently staked in a planting bed of red impatiens to the left of the front steps, a foot-square alarm-company sign warned that the premises were protected.

  Neighbors on the north. None to the south. The southside gate featured a gravity latch. She let herself through and followed a walkway between the garage and a property-line wall covered with espaliered jasmine vines. At the side door to the garage, she sat on the walkway, screened from the street by the gate, and waited.

  At 6:11, not long after dark, engine noise was followed by arcing headlights. A car pulled into the driveway, not visible from Jane’s position. The roll-up door rumbled, the alarm sounded, the car drove into the garage, and the door rolled down again.

  The alarm fell silent while the car was still running. He must have switched it off with his phone. As Jane got to her feet, lights came on in the house, also phone-controlled by Henry.

  He killed the engine. A car door slammed. He whistled on the way between his BMW 740i sedan and the connecting door to the house.

  When she heard the inner door close, Jane forced open the side door to the garage. She didn’t need the LockAid. She loided the simple latch with one of her driver’s licenses.

  The timer-controlled lamp on the door lift still provided soft light. Beside the BMW stood a candy-apple-red 1960 Corvette. The garage was clean and without clutter.

  Like most people with security systems, Henry didn’t engage the perimeter alarm when he was home. Good for Jane, bad for him.

  He also neglected to lock the door between house and garage. She stepped into a laundry room, then into a ground-floor hallway.

  Lights in the kitchen. Audience laughter as a TV came to life.

  Carrying her tote, she went upstairs. She settled into the darkness of the spare bedroom farthest from the master suite.

  After dinner, Henry watched a movie at such volume that the walls vibrated. Maybe giant robots, alien invaders. Interminable.

  Considering his Facebook postings, his use of a matchmaking service, and his lonely evening, she felt some sympathy for him.

  Nevertheless, she would take him down and take his car.

  When he went to bed at ten o’clock, he set the security system. The recorded voice announced, “Armed to home.”

  He’d activated the perimeter alarm, not the motion detectors.

  There was no reason to suppose he’d become suddenly suspicious in the middle of the night, but she braced the door with a straight-backed chair before stretching out on the bed. Oppressed by thoughts of the gauntlet awaiting her on the eighth floor, she had no concern about sleeping later than Henry.

  She woke repeatedly and got up at 4:05 A.M. Removed the tipped chair from under the doorknob. Went into the hallway.

  The moon at a window cast pale light perfect for haunting. She stopped at the open door to the master suite. Henry snored softly.

  Switching on her penlight, she entered. He was lying faceup.

  When she pumped the little spray bottle and spritzed the lower part of his face with chloroform, he twitched. His eyes fluttered open, but then he transitioned from one kind of sleep to another.

  He was wearing only briefs. Maybe a hundred fifty pounds. Dead weight. Yet she got him off the bed, dragged him by his arms.

  When he regained consciousness, he sat naked on the master-bath toilet in a windowless water closet, as isolated as any place in the house. His wrists were secured to each other with multiple windings of duct tape and were bound to his left thigh with more yards of tape. Heavy-duty plastic cable zips shackled his ankles, and a chain of those sturdy ties wrapped the base of the toilet, linking to the shackles. A cable zip encircled his neck, and a chain of them linked the neck restraint to the ankle shackles. Duct tape sealed his lips. His briefs hung from the doorknob, where he could see them.

  He cast off the effects of the chloroform quicker than Jane thought possible. He couldn’t imagine how he had gotten where he was. Shock and fear and mortification cleared his head, and a fine sweat broke out on his brow and upper lip.

  Standing in the open doorway, Jane said, “Are you with me?”

  He made a confirming sound through the duct tape.

  “Just to be sure, I’ll give you another couple minutes. Your life is at stake. It’s only fair to be sure you understand.”

  For those two minutes, his eyes never left her.

  “Okay, Henry. Here’s the thing. Maybe you’re just an ordinary worker bee at Far Horizons, you don’t know to what sick purpose all this research is being put. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. That’s why you’re not already dead. Got that?”

  He nodded.

  “Good boy. Now I’m going to take your car to Far Horizons, do a little business. When I come back, I’ll free you unhurt. Only you can get yourself killed, Henry. You know how these cable zips work?”

  He shook his head. Then nodded. Then shrugged.

  “I’ll explain. You can draw them as tight as you want, and then tighter, but they can’t be loosened. It’s the way the little teeth on them are designed. Tighter, yes. Looser, no. Like a ratchet. It�
��s as simple as Sesame Street. Understand?”

  He nodded.

  “A quick learner. Excellent. Now, Henry, I’ve left a finger’s width of space between the zip around your neck and your skin. Tight but not too tight. However, if you struggle to free yourself from the duct tape or shackles, I’ve connected these so your straining will draw the zip tighter around your throat. See how I’ve applied the ratchet principle to the problem of keeping you from escaping?”

  He nodded.

  “Good, good, good. That’s why we need to learn new things, Henry. Not just to know them, but to apply the knowledge properly. So if I hadn’t warned you about this, Henry, you might have made such a fierce effort that the zip would dig painfully into your flesh before you realized what was happening. If then you struggled further, struggled desperately…Well, what would happen then? Would your situation improve or deteriorate? What do you think?”

  He tried to say deteriorate through the duct tape.

  “Yes. That’s right. You have come such a long way in such a short time, Henry. Now I’m going to take the duct tape off your mouth. If you scream or shout for help, I’ll hurt you very badly, and no one will have heard your scream anyway. Henry, are you able to imagine what I might mean by ‘hurt you very badly’?”

  He nodded.

  “Good boy. Let’s see if you’re as smart as you seem to be.”

  She peeled the duct tape off his mouth.

  Henry drew a deep breath, shuddered as he exhaled, and issued a rush of words. “I’m a cost-control analyst, I budget, bargain with suppliers, I don’t know much about the research, hell’s bells, I don’t understand any of it.”

  She stared at him in silence. Then: “I didn’t come here to ask for your job description. Are you done with self-justifications?”

  “I’m just saying…”

  He fell silent when she drew one of the Heckler & Koch .45 Compacts from the double-carry rig under her sport coat.

  “Just answer my questions truthfully, and you’ll be teacher’s pet, Henry. Do you have a housekeeper?”

  “Yes.”

  “What days does she come in?”

  “Wednesday. Today. Nine o’clock. That’s why this won’t work. You picked the wrong day.”

  “On your Facebook page, Henry, you sometimes brag about your lifestyle. You’re very smooth at it, you make it amusing, and maybe you don’t even think of it as bragging, although that’s what it is. You call your housekeeper a maid. From what I’ve read, she comes in twice a week. Monday and Thursday. Has her schedule changed, Henry?”

  He hesitated. “No.”

  “And what is today?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “So you’ve already lied to me once. Do you know what happens if you lie to me twice, Henry?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “What will that be?”

  “You’ll hurt me.”

  She waited.

  “Very badly,” he added.

  “Better. I know that when you pull up to the garage gate at Far Horizons, a laser reader scans the sticker on your car windshield. Then the gate opens. On which of the three levels do you park?”

  “The first. Space twenty-three. Number’s on the wall. When you go through the gate, turn right. Then the space is on your left.”

  “There’s the good boy I knew you could be. You gave me five answers without making me ask five questions. The entry protocols are automated. But is there a guard at the garage, too, someone who will see it’s not you in that Beemer?”

  “No. Human beings are fallible. Technology is more reliable. We have cameras in the garage, but that’s just for a video record. The only way to go up from the garage is by elevator, and the elevator requires everyone boarding it to speak their name.”

  “Voice-recognition ID?”

  “Yeah. Plus your face is scanned. Facial recognition. You’re not going anywhere from the garage. Not anywhere. Whatever you’re after, you’re finished before you start. You should have done better research. There’s no point to all this shit.”

  “We’ll see.” She holstered the pistol. She picked up a roll of duct tape from the floor and wound a length of it three times around his head, sealing his mouth shut. “There, now. I like you much better this way.”

  22

  * * *

  During the night, the massive storm front had come down the coast of Oregon, gathering moisture from the sea, until the sky was a sea itself in search of a shore to break upon. Standing on its storied hills, San Francisco raised its shining towers and spires, bright and proud before the pending tempest. Whether here was the new Atlantis beyond all risk of submergence or Babylon erected on shadows mistaken for bedrock, only Time could know. The steep streets had never before troubled Jane Hawk; but in the foreboding light of a day waiting to be drowned, each climb seemed to lead to a precipice, and each descent threatened to become a plummet, although of course neither the city nor its inclines were what she feared.

  The previous day, employees of Far Horizons had arrived in two waves, the first at eight o’clock, the second at nine. She timed her approach so that she descended the driveway from the street at 9:10, when few people were still in the garage. She didn’t see the laser that read the windshield sticker, but the gate decoupled from its electronic locks and rolled aside, and she drove into the uppermost of the three subterranean floors.

  Space 23 was unoccupied, and she parked in it.

  When she got out of the BMW, she was aware of only two other people, both heading toward the elevators and paying her no heed.

  The cool air smelled faintly of the lime in the concrete walls, floor, and ceiling. The lingering exhaust fumes were more pungent.

  The pop-out in the middle of the south wall, which Wilson Faucheur had identified for her, was flanked by two parking spaces. The deadbolt lock succumbed quickly to the lock-release gun.

  Beyond lay a closet about six feet wide and four deep. She switched on the light and stepped inside and shut the door.

  To her left and right, foot-deep shelves held large cans of cleaning supplies and sealants. Floor-to-ceiling perfboard covered the four feet of back wall between the flanking shelves, and from it hung two push brooms and half a dozen other tools of the janitorial trade. None of the cans appeared to have been opened, and none was stained by drips. The push brooms and other tools were new. The closet looked less like one used by maintenance personnel than like a presentation display of products—or a masquerade to disguise the true purpose of the space.

  After some consideration, she took down the push brooms and other tools and set them aside and studied the wall. The hangers from which the various objects had depended were stainless steel, with shanks that disappeared into holes in the perfboard. She tried removing them. They were permanently fixed. Of the eight hangers, however, two turned like doorknobs. One turned 360 degrees to the left. Click. The hanger beside the first one turned 360 degrees to the right. Click. A motor purred, and the wall swung away from her, and light swelled to replace the darkness beyond.

  She stepped onto a landing at the foot of a staircase. Not spiral. Switchback. This side of the false wall was not covered in perfboard, and it featured a lever-style handle for easy exit. She closed it and heard the lock engage. She tried the handle, and the door opened, and she let it close again.

  The landing floor, stair risers, and treads were covered in a pale-gray rubbery material to afford sure and quiet footing. The walls and ceiling were of drywall painted white, and the light came from inlaid panels overhead.

  The only places that cameras could have been concealed were behind the lenses of the fluorescent-light panels, but they were heavily frosted, defeating any monitor. Wilson Faucheur evidently was right when he’d said the electronic security system and the architectural one would not overlap.

  She had previously screwed sound suppressors onto both pistols. She drew one .45 now and started sideways up the stairs, her back to the outer wall, so she would get
as early a look at each landing as possible. The pistol in a two-hand grip. Arms extended. The quiet pooled so deep that it seemed to have substance, filling the stairs as water filled a real well. No suggestion that her presence might be known. No adversary in sight. But she was in the labyrinth of the beast, and something worse lay ahead than just the Minotaur with its taste for human flesh.

  Two flights of stairs and one interim landing per floor. No exit door at the ground floor. None at the second. None at the third. By every indication, this was indeed the secret route by which D. J. Michael could escape the building in a crisis.

  Cautiously zigzagging upward, landing by landing.

  The lighting was so evenly distributed that she cast no shadow. Some dreams unfolded in such a shadowless silence. Only the rhythmic systole of her heart confirmed that she was not lost in sleep.

  On the eighth floor, she arrived at the first door. White in a white wall.

  If Randall Larkin had known what he was talking about, this exit would not be locked. Anyone who found these hidden stairs, either by accident or intention, was welcome to open this door and take her chances with what lay beyond.

  She continued to the ninth floor, just to ascertain that the door there was as formidable as she had been told. It was slightly larger than a regular door, a solid slab of steel no less daunting than a bank-vault door, surrounded by a single-piece cast-steel frame. The wall in which it was set would be perhaps two feet of concrete and rebar, embedded as well with a matrix of metal fibers, able to withstand even a shaped charge of C-4.

  That D.J. took these extreme measures to protect himself revealed a paranoia commensurate with his sociopathic lust for power. But was it really paranoia, considering that she had gotten to this threshold with the intention of forcing him to confess his crimes and seal his destruction? Or was it only prudence? A man might be mad and yet prudent in his madness. When he hoped to transform the entire world, rewrite all of history to his liking, and make himself a god among men, he was wise to expect that there would be those who resisted, as there had been throughout history, though too often those who’d resisted totalitarianism had triumphed late and often as much by chance as by design.