by Dean Koontz
“You sleepy?”
“Nope. The only way I can sleep is hanging by my toes from an attic rafter.”
“Batman,” Travis said, for now and then they played a little game in which Gavin said something ridiculous about himself and the boy had to guess what secret identity he was claiming.
“That one was too easy. While you nap, I’ll work up one that’ll stump you.”
Travis curled on his side, on the blanket, and let out a long sigh of weary contentment.
From time to time, Gavin heard the buzzing of a drone, mostly in the distance. Though the aircraft surely had nothing to do with him and Travis, he didn’t want to ride out of the cottonwoods until he hadn’t heard one of them for at least twenty minutes or half an hour.
He suspected that the boy knew as much and was feigning sleep, so that Gavin didn’t have to keep making excuses for why they were not starting the return trip home. Travis had inherited his parents’ good looks; he would be a heartbreaker when he grew up, but he would never break any, because he’d inherited their intelligence as well, and for a kid so young, he understood the concept of consequences, that one person’s wrong action produced another person’s pain. He had already been cured in the brine of grief, and a consequence of that was a regard for the feelings of others that few children had at his age and that some people never acquired. He’d make a hell of a Marine if he ever followed in his father’s footsteps.
Gavin Washington had been an Army man. He and Jessica had met Nick and Jane at a fundraiser for the Wounded Warrior Project in Virginia, fifteen months earlier. Their friendship formed quickly, effortlessly, for they recognized in one another shared attitudes and convictions without the need to explain themselves.
Sometimes it seemed to Gavin that they were brought together by providence, in preparation for all the crap that was coming fast in Jane’s life. Because both Gavin and Nick were spec ops guys, they shared an ingrained preference for discretion, for maintaining a low profile. Neither the Hawks nor the Washingtons were much interested in social media; there were no Facebook postings to link them, no Instagram or Snapchat accounts. They corresponded a little by snail mail, which left no indelible digital trail, and they spoke on the phone, but not often. Their friendship flourished face-to-face at weekend-long events for veterans’ causes in which Jessie had become an activist following the end of her own Army career. When Jane needed somewhere to hide her boy, family and friends with obvious connections could not provide her with a safe, secret redoubt. There had been only Gavin and Jessica, a continent away, but willing.
The thing that most troubled Gavin about the drones was the length of time they cruised the area. Maximum flight duration for one of that size was probably fifteen minutes, half an hour with a backup battery. He’d first heard these craft an hour earlier, and still the buzzing came and went. Of course if there was a tournament involving a club of enthusiasts, they would have brought numerous replacement batteries.
The wrens of both varieties were tireless in their singing. The rasping, scraping screech of a red-tailed hawk in triumph from time to time confirmed a good day’s hunting.
By contrast, in a silence came a large swarm of butterflies, Sara Orangetips, white with black and fiery-orange markings on their wingtips, harbingers of spring, lilting through the air like notes of a song translated from music into the hush of Lepidoptera. Their phosphorescent whiteness made ghosts of them in the shadows, but their true beauty flared as they danced through shafts of sunlight.
Perhaps twenty minutes after the most recent buzz of a drone, Travis sat up into that delicate, busy flocking. Yawning elaborately to prove that he’d been asleep, he held out his hands, onto which a few butterflies alighted and flexed their wings and tasted his skin before taking flight once more.
In ages past, various Indian tribes that roamed this territory had spoken of these butterflies as spirits that entered this world from another to celebrate the spring. Most said that they were omens of good luck and of healthy children soon to be born, although there had been a tribe that saw them as omens of death.
Getting up from the blanket, Travis said, “Time to go home?”
They had more than a two-hour ride ahead of them.
Reluctantly, Gavin rose to his feet. “Yeah, I guess we better scoot.”
The Sara Orangetips did not follow them when they rode out of the cottonwood grove and westward down the canyon.
Gavin wondered to himself, Which are we leaving behind—death or good luck?
2
In the ceiling light box, one of the fluorescent tubes faintly buzzing; fan-driven heat whispering out of a wall vent; refrigerator motor softly humming: a mechanical yet forlorn chorus…
Faster than a cube of ice becoming water in the summer sun, Booth Hendrickson transformed from a vain master of the universe into a willing and obedient prisoner. With the infusion of the third ampule, his terror and horror faded with an alacrity Jane could not comprehend. The inevitability of his oncoming conversion into an “adjusted person,” as he had once so arrogantly named them, seemed entirely to quell his anger, to bleed away any thought of vengeance. More surprising than that, with all options other than conversion denied him, his fate apparently did not depress him, but instead appeared to float him into a tranquil harbor. He relaxed in his restraints and closed his eyes and spoke quietly, less to Jane than to himself, words that might have seemed despairing but were in fact given an inflection that made of them an expression of contentment, “So here I am—it’s lovely, isn’t it?—after all these years, back here of all places, here in the dark alone.”
Jane looked at Gilberto, whose frown mirrored her own.
Hendrickson said, “I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.”
The hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of tiny brain-tropic nano constructs teeming through his blood would take eight to ten hours to reach their destination, pass through capillary walls into brain tissue, and self-assemble into a control mechanism by virtue of Brownian motion. Hendrickson could not already have been in any way affected by their presence in his bloodstream. His inexplicable contentment, mere hours away from the loss of his free will, seemed to confirm a psychology so twisted, so tortured, that unraveling the reason for this complacent acceptance might be impossible.
On the other hand, he was a prince of deceit. Jane had to assume that, even with Hendrickson’s future in chains from which no mortal power could free him, he was nevertheless scheming to use these last few hours to ensure her death, although he would have nothing to gain from it.
He opened his eyes and looked up at her with no evident animosity. “Why wait for the control mechanism to be in place? Interrogate me now. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
“The lies you want me to believe.”
“No, listen. Later, when you have total control of me, you can ask some questions again, check those answers against what I’ll give you now. You’ll save a lot of time that way.”
“Why should you care if I save time?”
“I don’t care. But I’d rather not spend these next eight hours just…waiting. The newest iteration of the mechanism installs in four hours. I didn’t know you’d taken ampules from Shenneck’s house. Maybe no one knew. They torched the house so fast, to cover what happened there. But what you took in Napa, what you injected into me, that’s an older version. Takes eight to ten hours. I might go a little crazy—don’t you think?—a little crazy just sitting here waiting to feel it come together inside my skull.”
Jane could imagine her anguish in his situation, and what she had done was a moral weight on her. She felt no guilt, but she recognized a responsibility to ease whatever foreboding he might feel during these hours of transition. Sympathy for the devil. Always dangerous.
When first waking from the chloroform sleep, still under the in
fluence of it, he had revealed something that he wasn’t likely to remember having disclosed. She tested him. “Last week I learned the access sentence that brings an adjusted person under my control. So you people must’ve been busy reprogramming them.”
“Play Manchurian with me,” he said. “That’s the one you know. Lots of plebs are accessed with that sentence.”
“ ‘Plebs’?”
“Plebs, plodders, rabble, two-legged cattle. Just other names for the adjusted people.”
His contempt for them seemed undiminished even though he was about to join their ranks.
“How many of them are there?” she asked.
“Plebs? Right now, over sixteen thousand.”
“Dear Lord,” Gilberto said, and he went to sit at the table.
“And what’s the new access sentence?”
Hendrickson didn’t hesitate. “Uncle Ira is not Uncle Ira.”
She had a clear memory of their conversation as he had first come out of the chloroform, not fully conscious:
Hey, sexy.
Hey.
I got a use for that pretty mouth.
I bet you do, big guy.
Bring it on down here. Uncle Ira is not Uncle Ira.
Who is he, then?
No, that’s not what you’re supposed to say.
What am I supposed to say?
You just say, all right.
A few exchanges later, he had dozed off once more.
Now that he’d passed her test, maybe she should invest minimal trust in him. But first she pressed him on his more recent, cryptic statements. “You said here you were again, here of all places, in the dark alone.” She quoted the rest as she remembered it. “ ‘I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.’ What is all that? What does it mean?”
Neither the soft voice in which he answered nor his childlike entreaty was characteristic of him. “What I said—all that stuff is of no importance to you, only to me. So don’t make me talk about it now. Leave me a little dignity. If you really want to know…wait till you control me. And then after I’ve told you, just please make me forget I ever did.”
Over Hendrickson had settled a hybrid mood that Jane could not fully read. A melancholy that his circumstances could well explain. But also a note of what seemed like a sentimental harking back. A wistful regret. And a curious sort of longing.
His lotus-leaf eyes were without their former power, and his pride gave way to something almost like humility, his manner that of a mendicant.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s see if we can fill those hours for you—but only if we fill them with the truth.”
3
Gavin Washington let Travis lead the way home on his Exmoor pony, the better to watch over him. The boy wore his riding helmet, which he disliked. But he wouldn’t be receiving his longed-for cowboy hat until he’d had a few more weeks of experience in the saddle.
Samson was a bit restive about the slow pace and would have liked to gallop full-out or at least canter. But the stallion was always mindful of the signals from his reins and his rider’s legs.
Following the pleasant midday warmth, a late-afternoon cooling had begun. Thin high clouds seemed not to drift through the sky, but instead to form on it like a skin of ice crystalizing on the surface of a pond, glazed patches reaching toward one another with growing fractal fingers that blurred away the blue. The fitful breeze had become constant, though it hadn’t swelled into a wind, rippling the sage not yet in bloom, shivering the spidery late-winter flowers of coombe wood.
Gavin remained alert for drones. Sometimes he thought he heard one in the distance, but getting a directional fix, before the sound faded, was hampered by the clatter of horseshoes on the stony soil plus the creak and clink of tack.
By the time they came out of the wildland to the gate at the back of their property, near four o’clock, Gavin no longer had any concern about the drones, which must have been flown by hobbyists. He could hear an aircraft circling high over the valley; but he hadn’t detected even a suggestion of the comparatively shrill motor of a drone in almost an hour and a half.
They watered the horses at the trough and led them into the stable and removed their saddles. They conducted them into their stalls and put on their feed bags.
Later, after the horses had been fed and the tack had been properly cared for, when Gavin came out of the stable with the boy, the growl of an airplane crawling the sky caused him to search for a dark shape against the hoarfrost clouds. The craft wasn’t within view, perhaps off to the north, and he assumed it was not the same plane that he’d heard earlier.
4
After Jane hobbled Hendrickson’s ankles with a pair of cable zip-ties, allowing him to walk only in a shuffle, she freed him from the gurney. With pistol drawn, Gilberto accompanied the captive to the bathroom and a few minutes later returned him to the kitchen table. Jane used another two zip-ties to link Hendrickson’s ankle fetters to the rear stretcher bar of the chair in which he sat.
She put her minirecorder in front of him. Wearing a PatrolEyes camera around her neck, with a spiral-bound notebook and pen, she sat directly across the table from him.
Her purpose was only in part to learn whom she needed to pursue to break the command structure of the Arcadians. In addition, his insider’s testimony should be useful in the eventual prosecution of these conspirators, and it might later help exonerate her of the criminal acts she’d been falsely accused of committing.
Gilberto sat witness. His pistol lay on the table, well out of Hendrickson’s reach, in case he still had tricks to spring on them.
A fresh pot of coffee, slices of Carmella’s ricotta pie, and Hendrickson’s new meek demeanor gave the proceedings an almost cozy context that felt surreal. At times the exchanges between Jane and Hendrickson grew eerie, as he seemed eager to please her not in the way a defendant might want to please a prosecutor or judge, but with the disturbing subservience that a child, browbeaten from the cradle and for years thereafter, might respond to a tyrannical parent.
In curious little ways, he seemed to regress from adulthood as the interrogation entered a second hour. He asked for another slice of pie and, eschewing the fork he’d used with the first serving, he broke off pieces of the treat and ate them with his fingers. He had been drinking coffee black but now wanted a lot of cream and four heaping spoons of sugar, essentially making another dessert of the brew. At times in the third and fourth hours, his attention drifted away from her; for ten seconds, fifteen, half a minute, he fell silent and stared into some private elsewhere. Always, Jane could bring him back to the issue at hand, but she had the impression that Hendrickson was slowly becoming dissociated from the reality of a life of submission into which he was sliding.
She wondered if something might be going very wrong with the nanomachine implantation. As it self-assembled its cerebral web, might it be causing subtle brain damage akin to a stroke?
But his speech wasn’t slurred. Neither were there signs of weakness or paralysis. He didn’t complain of numbness, tingling, vertigo, or impaired vision.
He was more likely undergoing a psychological rather than a physiological fracturing.
Supposing he was telling the truth, he’d already given her a treasure of information, though his revelations were limited because of the structure of the Arcadian cabal. In the classic tradition of spy networks and resistance movements, they were organized into numerous cells, each with a limited number of members, and those in one cell didn’t know the identities of those in others. Access to the complete roster of Arcadians remained a privilege of those at the very top of the pyramid. Hendrickson, for all his former power and posturing, didn’t know how far up in the Arcadian architecture his position might be. Considering his grandiose opinion of himself prior to the infusion of a control mechanism, he’d likely ima
gined that he was closer to the pinnacle than was the case.
What she was getting from him, however, gave her tools to use and new people to go after. She had thought that the now-deceased billionaire David James Michael had perched at the top of the Arcadian pyramid, and she had taken enormous risks to get at him. For the first time since the shocking events in D. J. Michael’s penthouse in San Francisco, she might have a chance to tear apart the Arcadian nest and pull from it a writhing tangle of these vipers, bring them into the sunlight of revelation that they shunned with vampiric dread.
Interrogation could be an exhausting process, especially for someone who was betraying every associate with whom he was entwined in criminal activities. It was no less tiring for the interrogator. Shortly before five o’clock, Jane called for a break. She’d had little to eat in the past twenty-four hours and needed to refuel to sharpen her concentration.
“I’ll get some takeout,” Gilberto said. “There’s a good place down the street.”
“Protein,” Jane said. “Don’t load me up with carbs.”
“It’s Chinese.”
He suggested some dishes, and Jane approved.
“You?” Gilberto asked Hendrickson.
The captive didn’t answer. He sat with his hands upturned on the table, staring at his palms. The faintest smile suggested that he wasn’t reading his future, but perhaps remembering things that his hands had touched and done to his satisfaction.
“Get him what we’re having,” Jane said. “He’s in no position to be picky.”
5
Subhadra labored through an eternal storm, or so it seemed, for the novelette would advance only grudgingly. Tanuja pushed with all her creative energy, as if the narrative were a boulder and she were Sisyphus being punished for trickery, fated never to get the great stone to the top of the hill before it rolled down yet again.