by Dean Koontz
She spread her arms as if nailed on a cross, full length from her body, a Heckler aimed slightly up and to each side, a little pressure on each trigger. Peering into the pale light to her right. Teeth clenched. Braced for the impact of one or both assailants, which would ensure failure, savaging, and a horrific death. The Golgothan gloom of the world outside. The tomb-dark room around her. A sword of the storm flashed, and she thought that she saw a shape hurtling from a mid-tier bar to a lower one. Between the slash of light and the thunder felled by it, she heard a hissing, the nearly mute expression of bestial fury. At Quantico, she had been at the top of her class in gunmanship, hands strong enough to squeeze the trigger on a practice gun more than ninety times in a minute, and now she beat her best time, emptying both pistols, the pain in her side flaring as the sound suppressors deteriorated somewhat with the rapid fire.
She heard brief agonized screams, but she could not say for sure if two creatures had cried out or one. If one yet lived, she needed to change positions and reload as fast as possible.
Back to the wall, she slid down and sat on the floor. Dropped one Heckler between her splayed legs. Ejected the magazine from the other. Tore a fresh magazine from the Velcro system on her gun belt. Clicked it into the pistol. This time she took a two-hand grip.
Tall panes of glass to her left and right, palest window forms on the concrete. To her right, a still and huddled mass lying in the faintness of daylight. She caught the foul scent of its feces shed in the shock of death. To her left lay a similar shape of pale light…but no reeking mass of dead primate.
Blotting the sweat from her eyes again, she cursed the pain as if it were some sentient creature that had its teeth in her.
She peered into the blackness on her left, where some grinning ogre might yet be crouching, long toes wrapped on a lower grab bar, hands clutching the bar over its head, watching her with vicious intent. She kept the Heckler close to her body, aimed left and up.
The ape erupted out of the dark directly in front of her, so fast across the floor and between her legs, hissing in rage, its mock-human face suddenly inches from hers, eyes yellow-maroon as though with spectral light shining from within. She cried out, and the ape hissed more fiercely, spitting blood, evidently wounded. Striking as quick as a coiled snake, it seized her head with one hand, tore out her hair, brandishing the trophy with a triumphant scream. As the ape held her wig, Jane shot it point-blank in the chest, expending all nine rounds, and the creature seemed to be yanked backward and away, as if retrieved by the manipulation of some puppeteer.
27
* * *
Beyond the window, darkened buildings dwindled down the long hill for two blocks, perhaps three, but lights glistered in the rain-swept lower regions of the city and on the other storm-lashed hills. The power outrage was confined to the neighborhood serviced by whatever transformer vault or other facility had been struck by lightning.
The initial sting of the wound, like a razor slash, had become a more tolerable throbbing ache.
As she clicked a fresh magazine into each pistol and holstered one weapon, Jane stood in the watery light admitted by the thick glass, gazing out at the metropolis as it shimmered in the wet. She felt as if she were balanced upon a treacherous escarpment between two creations—the one that had been forever and the one that was being born in these times of utopian change. She could not help but think of Edgar Allan Poe again, the melancholy waters of his city in the sea, where “the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.” After the coming tide of change had passed, there would be no rest in the new world, only the peace of submission or death, only the quiet dread that keeps the mouse mute in the presence of the fanged and searching cat. Many in this city had gone to their rest throughout its history, and many more would go, perhaps many of them sooner than they imagined. But right now the worst of the worst remained alive one floor above her, a wrong that needed to be set right.
Carrying a pistol in one hand and a penlight in the other, she made her way among the strewn carcasses to the apartment where the four rayshaws had resided in pitiable privation. Bare mattresses on the floor were their only beds. No kitchen other than a refrigerator and a microwave. A shower stall, a toilet, a sink of the cheapest quality in a building otherwise elegantly appointed. No armchairs or sofas. No television. A simple table and four chairs, where they might have eaten or played the interminable card games with which they passed the time like engines idling until pressure might be applied to their accelerators. No one had lived here. The brain of each of the four men had been a multifoliate splendor that had been ruthlessly defoliated, reduced to but a few leaves of cognition, so that they existed here not as men but as programmed killing machines of flesh and bone.
She took off her sport coat and hung it on one of the game-table chairs and pulled her blood-sodden shirt out of her jeans to examine her left side by the beam of the penlight. No entry hole. The bullet scored her side exactly where a love handle would have been if she’d had love handles. A three- or four-inch gouge, half an inch deep. No arterial bleeding. A steady but acceptable flow from torn capillaries. The heat of the bullet could have cauterized part of the wound. She might lose a pint of blood before she was done. She wasn’t going to die from this. The bigger problem was the risk of infection, but she did not have to think about that until later.
She tucked in her shirt because it applied at least some pressure to the wound, and she put on the sport coat once more.
With his cameras blind, D.J. would likely assume she had been killed. But he might not wait for confirmation until the power came on. He might call someone to come to the eighth floor and check. If she hadn’t already run out of time, she didn’t have much left.
In one corner of the apartment, she set the penlight on the floor so that the beam reflected off a white wall, providing meager but adequate light. She holstered the .45, took a sheath from the Velcro-attachment system on her gun belt, and withdrew a drywall knife from the sheath.
Wilson Faucheur had identified a passageway from the eighth floor to the ninth, allowing her to bypass the vaultlike door to D. J. Michael’s apartment. Using the knife, she cut out a two-foot-wide, four-foot-high slab of drywall and put it on the floor. She picked up the penlight and examined what had been exposed: a four-foot-deep seven-foot-wide chase formed of poured-in-place concrete on three sides, in which were bundled a stack of inflowing water pipes and outflowing drains that served the top two floors, plus a separate bundle of PVC pipes containing electric cables, audio-system fiber-optics, and whatnot.
Four feet of the seven-foot width were reserved for future service pipes, leaving plenty of room for a determined intruder to ascend from the eighth story of the building to the ninth.
After clipping the penlight to her coat, Jane slipped between the wall studs to which the drywall was attached. She turned to face the room that she’d just departed, and she used the cats—horizontal pieces of lumber that connected the wall studs for reinforcement—as ladder rungs to climb up through the chase, behind the wall.
By now she was not hampered by the pain so much as motivated by it, in a contest to prove that with willpower she could override the distress of the body.
Inevitably, cutting the drywall caused some noise, and making her way upward caused less, but she doubted that D. J. Michael would hear anything quieter than a flash-bang grenade. The thick concrete between stories damped most sound, and the storm provided screening noise. Besides, when she arrived at her destination, she would come out into a service closet full of panels of circuit breakers and phone-service electronics, in the corner of the apartment farthest from his main living areas.
If the billionaire, his cameras blinded by the power outage, nevertheless intuited that she survived, he wouldn’t risk leaving by the hidden stairwell for fear of encountering her. He’d hunker down behind his vault door, as supremely confident as he had ever been.
At the thick concrete stratum that
served as the ceiling of the eighth story and the floor of the ninth, tributaries of the drain and water pipes disappeared therein. She passed through the open chase into the ninth level, where branch lines of the other utility pipes angled away through the drywall.
Braced between studs and sawing with some difficulty, she used the drywall knife to cut an opening into the service closet. There she played the penlight over the electrical panels and phone-company boxes.
Thank you, Wilson Faucheur.
From a pouch on her gun belt, she withdrew one of the toys she had bought in Reseda, a PatrolEyes body camera used by many police departments, which she’d fixed to a lanyard. She hung it around her neck. The device weighed only about six ounces. With its wide-angle lens, it could capture hours of high-definition footage and quality audio.
She drew one of the Hecklers, switched off and pocketed the penlight, and opened the service-closet door.
The power company could not already have replaced a lightning-struck transformer; but there was light in D. J. Michael’s enormous apartment. Evidently he enjoyed a dedicated generator to provide power in such emergencies.
She went after him.
28
* * *
Jane into the high lair, nine thousand square feet of Olympian grandeur where a mad god did whatever gods with a lowercase g do when they aren’t destroying one world and building another…
The pitiable circumstances in which the rayshaws had lived was proof of D.J.’s contempt for these simplest of his creations. She doubted he would want one of them to share his personal space, and he surely wouldn’t keep a programmed ape here on the ninth floor.
If there were servants—housekeeper, cook, butler—they would be like the citizens of Iron Furnace, allowed a degree of apparent autonomy but nonetheless tightly controlled. He would not bring into his personal space servants with their free will intact, when he could ensure his privacy by staffing his homes with his higher-level semizombies. Their enslavement was permanent; if she had to kill them to get to their master, she would be freeing them.
In the event there was a guest or two…
Well, any guest was likely to be an Arcadian. She would have to do with them whatever the situation required.
Along a short hallway, past a kitchen, she proceeded through a few grand rooms that flowed gracefully one to another, furnished with Art Deco antiques, museum-quality furniture by Deskey, Dufrêne, Ruhlmann, Süe et Mare….Antique Persian carpets suitable to the palaces of sultans. Everywhere were exquisite Tiffany lamps of the rarest patterns. Chandeliers by Simonet Frères. Voluptuous paintings by Lempicka, Domergue, Dupas. Sculpture by Chiparus, Lorenzl, Preiss. Enamels by Jean Dunand. Here in one residence were tens of millions’ worth of antiques and art—and so far not any sign of an inhabitant.
How strange it seemed that a man who meant to overturn the past, rewrite history to his taste, and create a future divorced from everything that had come before should create for himself this haven designed in every detail to transport him to the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps he perceived in that past age some promise that had never been realized, that he intended now to fulfill.
As she passed through this residence of museum-quality art and furnishings, Jane felt a little disoriented, perhaps because these relentlessly elegant items, acquired with so much effort and at such expense, arranged in judiciously considered order, was in unsettling contrast to the eighth-floor horror of rayshaws and apes and bloody violence. A curious and inconstant tinnitus afflicted her, two or three oscillating electronic tones weaving together, swelling but then fading to silence, like a soundtrack to her disorientation.
As on the eighth floor, windows here were of thick bulletproof glass. Ashen morning light, sheeting rain, and a cityscape as gray as if rendered in pencil provided a contrasting background to the warm colors and glamour of these interiors.
When Jane entered the great room with its half dozen seating arrangements, there were as well the sounds of Nature’s current performance: the periodic grumble from the throat of the storm, the susurration of the rushing skeins of rain, the patter of droplets slanting under the tenth-floor overhang to puddle on the paving stones of the ninth-floor balcony.
The double doors to that deep deck stood open wide. As though he had ridden down from the heavens on the currents of the storm, David James Michael appeared at that threshold and stepped in from the balcony.
She was overcome with the desire to say, This is for Nick, and shoot the bastard right there, right then. She would have done it if she hadn’t needed his testimony.
He smiled. “Mrs. Hawk, your persistence and endurance are remarkable. Welcome to my humble home. I’d offer you a drink, but that seems to be an excessive courtesy, considering that you would like to see me dead.”
“Dead is good. Better would be impoverished and in prison.”
He might not have been alone on the balcony. No one was visible through the tall windows, but there were areas she couldn’t see.
“You don’t look well, Mrs. Hawk. There’s blood on your jacket.”
After pressing a button to activate the PatrolEyes videocam that hung from her neck, she kept a two-hand grip on her pistol.
He said, “Would you like me to call the paramedics?”
“No, Mr. Michael. I’ll call them when you need them.”
He stood beside a Ruhlmann chair, a chunky block bergère buttered by the light from a Tiffany dragonfly-motif floor lamp in shades of yellow ranging from dark amber to lemon.
The warm glow flattered him. A handsome boyish-looking forty-four, with tousled blond hair, he stood there in sneakers and jeans and untucked shirt, projecting his preferred image as a free spirit, a billionaire without pretensions. Of course the sneakers were maybe by Tom Ford, the jeans by Dior Homme, the shirt by David Hart, a three-thousand-dollar ensemble, not counting the underwear.
Just being in the same room with him left her feeling unclean, to see him looking her over as if considering her for Aspasia.
“Tell me about the Tech Arcadians, Mr. Michael.”
“Sounds like some second-rate band. What do they play—retro dance music from the eighties?”
“You’re a smug sonofabitch, aren’t you? But you’ll talk.”
“How will you precipitate an interrogation, Mrs. Hawk? Zap me with a Taser, chloroform me, strip me naked, tie me with cable zips, and tease my penis with a switchblade? Is that what you were taught back at Quantico? Hardly seems constitutional.” He cupped a hand to one ear. “Do you hear that?”
She didn’t want to play his game. Instead of answering his question, she said, “Park your ass in that chair.”
“Do you hear that?” he repeated. “It’s the future calling. It’s a future you don’t understand and in which you have no role.”
She would have liked nothing better than to kill him, with or without a confession.
“Mrs. Hawk…Or should I say Widow Hawk? No, you might find it painful to be addressed as such. Just Jane. Jane, because I know your type so very well, I’m sure you believe in the existence of a conscience. A little inner voice that tells you right from wrong.”
“Because I know your type so very well,” she said, “I’m sure you don’t.”
He moved away from the chair, toward a Süe et Mare gilt-wood settee and matching armchairs upholstered in an Aubusson tapestry.
Moving with him, remaining peripherally aware of the open doors to the balcony, alert for movement elsewhere in the large room, Jane decided for the moment to let him do this his way, as it might lead to revelations more quickly than would an interrogation. He was such a narcissist, he no doubt believed that he could persuade her of the rightness of his position—and that even if he could not win her over, he would by some unexpected twist of fate overcome her, if only because destiny would always bend the course of events, bend the universe itself, to ensure a favorable result for D. J. Michael.
“You think a human conscience is essential for civilization to
exist and remain stable,” he said. “Well, I propose to install just such a thing where it does not now exist. In a sense, we’re allies.”
He didn’t sit in either the settee or one of the chairs, but stood staring at a series of Ferdinand Preiss figurines that stood on the Ruhlmann coffee table: cold-painted, intricately costumed bronze dancers on marble and onyx bases, their faces and limbs of carved and tinted ivory.
Jane’s tinnitus grew louder, and she surveyed the room as if some musician might be seated in a corner, playing a theremin. But of course the sound was internal, and again it faded.
“When refined to perfection in a year or two,” D. J. Michael said, “the ultimate nanoimplant will rest so lightly within the skull that those graced with it won’t have the slightest suspicion that their free will to do evil has been restrained. The decisions they make and the actions they take will seem always to be their choices. Their values and morals will be corrected with such subtlety that every change of opinion will seem to have been a product of their own reasoning.”
She said, “And you—just you—will decide what is evil, what’s moral and what’s not, what the right values are.”
Until he looked at her, she would not have thought that a smile could convey such acidic pity, such scalding contempt. Yet his voice remained soft and reasonable as he continued to speak this unreason. “Look at the world in all its horror, Jane. In all its chaos. War and injustice. Bigotry and hatred. Envy and greed. The codes of right and wrong that humanity has designed and endorsed—have they ever worked, Jane? Are not all the codes misguided in one way or another, and therefore unworkable?”