by Dean Koontz
was staying in a hotel. I’m a reasonably sound sleeper. At two-thirty in the morning, someone switched on my nightstand lamp and put a gun in my face.”
After years of waiting for Go-Team calls, Barbara had long ago overcome a tendency to shed sleep slowly. She woke to the click of the lamp switch and the flood of light as she would have awakened to the ringing telephone: instantly alert and clearheaded.
She might have cried out at the sight of the intruder, except that her shock pinched off her voice and her breath.
The gunman, about forty, had large sad eyes, hound-dog eyes, a nose bashed red by the slow blows of two decades of drink, and a sensuous mouth. His thick lips never quite closed, as though waiting for the next treat that couldn’t be resisted—cigarette, whiskey, pastry, or breast.
His voice was as soft and sympathetic as a mortician’s but with no unctuousness. He indicated that the pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor, and he assured her that if she tried to call for help, he would blow her brains out with no concern that anyone beyond the room would hear the shot.
She tried to ask who he was, what he wanted.
Hushing her, he sat on the edge of her bed.
He had nothing against her personally, he said, and it would depress him to have to kill her. Besides, if the IIC of the probe of Flight 353 were to be found murdered, inconvenient questions might be asked.
The sensualist’s bosses, whoever they might be, could not afford inconvenient questions at this time, on this issue.
Barbara realized that a second man was in the room. He had been standing in the corner near the bathroom door, on the other side of the bed from the gunman.
This one was ten years younger than the first. His smooth pink face and choirboy eyes gave him an innocent demeanor that was belied by a disquietingly eager smile that came and went like the flickering of a serpent’s tongue.
The older man pulled the covers off Barbara and politely asked her to get out of bed. They had a few things to explain to her, he said. And they wanted to be certain that she was alert and attentive throughout, because lives depended on her understanding and believing what they had come to tell her.
In her pajamas, she stood obediently while the younger man, with a flurry of brief smiles, went to the desk, withdrew the chair from the kneehole, and stood it opposite the foot of the bed. She sat as instructed.
She had been wondering how they had gotten in, as she’d engaged both the deadbolt and the security chain on the door to the corridor. Now she saw that both of the doors between this hotel room and the next—which could be connected to form a suite for those guests who required more space—stood open. The mystery remained, however, for she was certain that the door on this side had been securely locked with a deadbolt when she had gone to bed.
At the direction of the older man, the younger produced a roll of strapping tape and a pair of scissors. He secured Barbara’s wrists tightly to the arms of the straight-back chair, wrapping the tape several times.
Frightened of being restrained and helpless, Barbara nonetheless submitted because she believed that the sad-eyed man would deliver on his threat to shoot her point-blank in the head if she resisted. With his sensuous mouth, as though sampling the contents of a bonbon box, he had savored the words blow your brains out.
When the younger man cut a six-inch length of tape and pressed it firmly across Barbara’s mouth, then secured that piece by winding a continuous length of tape twice around her head, she panicked for a moment but then regained control of herself. They were not going to pinch her nose shut and smother her. If they had come here to kill her, she would be dead already.
As the younger man retreated with his tremulous smiles to a shadowy corner, the sensualist sat on the foot of the bed, opposite Barbara. Their knees were no more than a few inches apart.
Putting his pistol aside on the rumpled sheets, he took a knife from a jacket pocket. A switchblade. He flicked it open.
Her fear soaring again, Barbara could manage to draw only quick, shallow breaths. The resultant whistling in her nose amused the man sitting with her.
From another jacket pocket, he withdrew a snack-size round of Gouda cheese. Using the knife, he removed the cellophane wrapper and then peeled off the red wax skin that prevented the Gouda from developing mold.
Carefully eating thin slivers of cheese off the wickedly sharp blade, he told Barbara that he knew where her son, Denny, lived and worked. He recited the addresses.
He also knew that Denny had been married to Rebekah for thirteen months, nine days, and—he consulted his watch, calculated—fifteen hours. He knew that Rebekah was six months pregnant with their first child, a girl, whom they were going to name Felicia.
To prevent harm from befalling Denny and his bride, Barbara was expected to accept the official story about what had happened to the tape from the cockpit-voice recorder on Flight 353—a story that she had rejected in discussions with her colleagues and that she had set out to disprove. She was also expected to forget what she had heard on the enhanced version of that tape.
If she continued to seek the truth of the situation or attempted to express her concerns to either the press or the public, Denny and Rebekah would disappear. In the deep basement of a private redoubt soundproofed and equipped for prolonged and difficult interrogations, the sensualist and his associates would shackle Denny, tape open his eyes, and force him to watch while they killed Rebekah and the unborn child.
Then they would surgically remove one of his fingers every day for ten days—taking elaborate measures to control bleeding, shock, and infection. They would keep him alive and alert, though steadily less whole. On the eleventh and twelfth days, they would remove his ears.
They had a full month of imaginative surgery planned.
Every day, as they took another piece of him, they would tell Denny that they would release him to his mother without further harm if she would only agree to cooperate with them in a conspiracy of silence that was, after all, in the national interest. Vitally important defense matters were involved here.
This would not be entirely true. The part about the national interest was true, from their point of view, at least, even though they could not, of course, explain to Barbara how the knowledge she possessed was a threat to her country. The part about her being able to earn Denny’s release by cooperation would not be true, however, because once she failed to honor a pledge of silence, she would not be given a second chance, and her son would be forever lost to her. They would deceive Denny solely to ensure that he would spend the last month of his life desperately wondering why his mother had so stubbornly condemned him to such excruciating pain and horrible disfigurement. By the end, half mad or worse, in deep spiritual misery, he would curse her vehemently and beg God to let her rot in Hell.
As he continued to carve the tiny wheel of Gouda and serve himself off the dangerous point of the blade, the sensualist assured Barbara that no one—not the police, not the admittedly clever FBI, not the mighty United States Army—could keep Denny and Rebekah safe forever. He claimed to be employed by an organization with such bottomless resources and extensive connections that it was capable of compromising and subverting any institution or agency of the federal or state governments.
He asked her to nod if she believed him.
She did believe him. Implicitly. Without reservation. His seductive voice, which seemed to lick each of his hideous threats to savor the texture and astringency of it, was filled with the quiet confidence and smug superiority of a megalomaniac who carries the badge of a secret authority, receives a comfortable salary with numerous fringe benefits, and knows that in his old age he will be able to rely upon the cushion of a generous civil-service pension.
He then asked her if she intended to cooperate.
With guilt and humiliation but also with utter sincerity, she nodded again. Yes. She would cooperate. Yes.
Studying a pale oval of cheese like a tiny filleted fish on the point of the blade
, he said that he wanted her to be deeply impressed with his determination to ensure her cooperation, so impressed that she would be in no danger of forsaking the pledge she had just made to him. Therefore, on their way out of the hotel, he and his partner would select, at random, an employee or perhaps a guest—someone who just happened to cross their path—and would kill that person on the spot. Three shots: two in the chest, one in the head.
Stunned, Barbara protested from behind the gag, contorting her face in an effort to twist the tape and free her mouth. But it was pulled cruelly tight, and her lips were stuck firmly to the adhesive, and the only argument that she could get out was a pained, muffled, wordless pleading. She didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death. She was going to cooperate. There was no reason to impress her with their seriousness. No reason. She already believed in their seriousness.
Never taking his great sad eyes from her, without saying another word, he slowly finished his cheese.
His unwavering stare seemed to cause a power backflow, draining her of energy. Yet she could not look away.
When he had consumed the final morsel, he wiped the blade of his knife on the sheets. Then he folded it into the handle and returned the weapon to his pocket.
Sucking on his teeth and rolling his tongue slowly around his mouth, he gathered up the shredded cellophane and the peels of red wax. He rose from the bed and deposited the trash in the waste basket beside the desk.
The younger man stepped out of the shadowy corner. His thin but eager smile no longer fluttered uncertainly; it was fixed.
From behind the strapping tape, Barbara was still attempting to protest the murder of an innocent person when the older man returned to her and, with the edge of his right hand, chopped hard at the side of her neck.
As a scintillant darkness sprayed across her field of vision, she started to slump forward. She felt the chair tipping sideways. She was unconscious before her head hit the carpet.
For perhaps twenty minutes she dreamed of severed fingers in preserving sheaths of red wax. In shrimp-pink faces, fragile smiles broke like strings of pearls, the bright teeth bouncing and rolling across the floor, but in the black crescent between the curved pink lips, new pearls formed, and a choirboy eye blinked blue. There were hound-dog eyes too, as black and shiny as leeches, in which she saw not her reflection but images of Denny’s screaming, earless face.
When she regained consciousness, she was slumped in the chair, which had been set upright again. Either the sensualist or his pearl-toothed companion had taken pity on her.
Her wrists were taped to the arms of the chair in such a fashion as to allow her to wrench loose if she applied herself diligently. She needed less than ten minutes to free her right hand, much less to slip the bonds on the left.
She used her own cuticle scissors to snip through the tape wound around her head. When she gingerly pulled it off her lips, it took far less skin than she expected.
Liberated and able to talk, she found herself at the telephone with the receiver in her hand. But she could think of no one whom she dared to call, and she put the phone down.
There was no point in warning the hotel’s night manager that one of his employees or guests was in danger. If the gunman had kept his threat to impress her with a senseless, random killing, he had pulled the trigger already. He and his companion would have left the hotel at least half an hour ago.
Wincing at the throbbing pain in her neck, she went to the door that connected her room with theirs. She opened it and checked the inner face. Her privacy deadbolt latch was backed by a removable brass plate fixed in place with screws, which allowed access to the mechanism of her lock from the other side. The other room’s door featured no such access plate.
The shiny brass looked new. She was certain that it had been installed shortly before she checked into the hotel—by the gunman and his companion acting either clandestinely or with the assistance of a hotel engineer. A clerk at the front desk was paid or coerced to put her in this room rather than any other.
Barbara was not much of a drinker, but she raided the honor bar for a two-shot miniature of vodka and a cold bottle of orange juice. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely pour the ingredients into a glass. She drank the screwdriver straight down, opened another miniature, mixed a second drink, took a swallow of it—then went into the bathroom and threw up.
She felt unclean. With dawn less than an hour away, she took a long shower, scrubbing herself so hard and standing in water so hot that her skin grew red and stung unbearably.
Although she knew that it was pointless to change hotels, that they could find her again if they wanted her, she couldn’t stay any longer in this place. She packed and, an hour after first light, went down to the front desk to pay her bill.
The ornate lobby was full of San Francisco policemen—uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives.
From the wide-eyed cashier, Barbara learned that sometime after three o’clock in the morning, a young room-service waiter had been shot to death in a service corridor near the kitchen. Twice in the chest and once in the head.
The body had not been discovered immediately because, curiously, no one had heard gunfire.
Harried by fear that seemed to push her forward like a rude hand in the back, she checked out. She took a taxi to another hotel.
The day was high and blue. The city’s famous fog was already pulling back across the bay into a towering palisade beyond the Golden Gate, of which she had a limited view from her new room.
She was an aeronautical engineer. A pilot. She held a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University. She had worked hard to become the only current female IIC working air crashes for the National Transportation Safety Board. When her husband had walked out on her seventeen years ago, she had raised Denny alone and raised him well. Now all that she had achieved seemed to have been gathered into the hand of the sad-eyed sensualist, wadded with the cellophane and the peels of red wax, and thrown into the trash can.
After canceling her appointments for the day, Barbara hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. She closed the draperies and curled on the bed in her new room.
Quaking fear became quaking grief. She wept uncontrollably for the dead room-service waiter whose name she didn’t know, for Denny and Rebekah and unborn Felicia whose lives now seemed perpetually suspended on a slender thread, for her own loss of innocence and self-respect, for the three hundred and thirty people aboard Flight 353, for justice thwarted and hope lost.
A sudden wind groaned across the meadow, playing with old dry aspen leaves, like the devil counting souls and casting them away.
“I can’t let you do this,” Joe said. “I can’t let you tell me what was on the cockpit-voice recorder if there’s any chance it’s going to put your son and his family in the hands of people like that.”
“It’s not for you to decide, Joe.”
“The hell it’s not.”
“When you called from Los Angeles, I played dumb because I’ve got to assume my phone is permanently tapped, every word recorded. Actually, I don’t think it is. I don’t think they feel any need to tap it, because they know by now that they’ve got me muzzled.”
“If there’s even a chance—”
“And I know for certain I’m not being watched. My house isn’t under observation. I’d have picked up on that long ago. When I walked out on the investigation, took early retirement, sold the house in Bethesda, and came back to Colorado Springs, they wrote me off, Joe. I was broken, and they knew it.”
“You don’t seem broken to me.”
She patted his shoulder, grateful for the compliment. “I’ve rebuilt myself some. Anyway, if you weren’t followed—”
“I wasn’t. I lost them yesterday. No one could have followed me to LAX this morning.”
“Then I figure there’s no one to know we’re here or to know what I tell you. All I ask is you never say you got it from me.”
“I
wouldn’t do that to you. But there’s still such a risk you’ll be taking,” he worried.
“I’ve had months to think about it, to live with it, and the way it seems to me is…They probably think I told Denny some of it, so he would know what danger he’s in, so he’d be careful, watchful.”
“Did you?”
“Not a word. What kind of a life could they have, knowing?”
“Not a normal one.”
“But now Denny, Rebekah, Felicia, and I are going to be hanging by a thread as long as this cover-up continues. Our only hope is for someone else to blow it wide open, so then what little I know about it won’t matter any more.”
The storm clouds were not only in the east now. Like an armada of incoming starships in a film about futuristic warfare, ominous black thunderheads slowly resolved out of the white mists overhead.
“Otherwise,” Barbara continued, “a year from now or two years from now, even though I’ve kept my mouth shut, they’ll decide to tie up all the loose ends. Flight 353 will be such old news that no one will connect my death or Denny’s or a handful of others to it. No suspicions will be raised if something happens to those of us with incriminating bits of information. These people, whoever the hell they are…they’ll buy insurance with a car accident here, a fire there. A faked robbery to cover a murder. A suicide.”
Through Joe’s mind passed the waking-nightmare images of Lisa burning, Georgine dead on the kitchen floor, Charlie in the blood-tinted light.
He couldn’t argue with Barbara’s assessment. She probably had it figured right.
In a sky waiting to snarl and crackle, menacing faces formed in the clouds, blind and open-mouthed, choked with anger.
Taking her first fateful step toward revelation, Barbara said, “The flight-data recorder and the cockpit-voice recorder arrived in Washington on the Gulfstream and were in the labs by three o’clock Eastern Time the day after the crash.”
“You were still just getting into the investigation here.”
“That’s right. Minh Tran—he’s an electronics engineer with the Safety Board—and a few colleagues opened the Fairchild recorder. It’s almost as large as a shoe box, jacketed in three-eighths of an inch of stainless steel. They cut it carefully, with a special saw. This particular unit had endured such violent impact that it was compressed four inches end to end—the steel just crunched up like cardboard—and one corner had been crushed, resulting in a small breach.”
“And it still functioned?”
“No. The recorder was completely destroyed. But inside the larger box is the steel memory module. It contains the tape. It was also breached. A small amount of moisture had penetrated all the way into the memory module, but the tape wasn’t entirely ruined. It had to be dried, processed, but that didn’t take long, and then Minh and a few others gathered in a soundproof listening room to run it from the beginning. There were almost three hours of cockpit conversation leading up to the crash—”
Joe said, “They don’t just run it fast forward to the last few minutes?”
“No. Something earlier in the flight, something that seemed to be of no importance to the pilots at the time, might provide clues that help us understand what we’re hearing in the moments immediately before the plane went down.”
Steadily rising, the warm wind was brisk enough now to foil the lethargic bees on their lazy quest from bloom to bloom. Surrendering the field to the oncoming storm, they departed for secret nests in the woods.
“Sometimes we get a cockpit tape that’s all but useless to us,” Barbara continued. “The recording quality’s lousy for one reason or another. Maybe the tape’s old and abraded. Maybe the microphone is the hand-held type or isn’t functioning as well as it should, too much vibration. Maybe the recording head is worn and causing distortion.”
“I would think there’d be daily maintenance, weekly replacement, when it’s something as important as this.”
“Remember, as a percentage of flights, planes rarely go down. There are costs and flight-time delays to be considered. Anyway, commercial aviation is a human enterprise, Joe. And what human enterprise ever operates to ideal standards?”
“Point taken.”
“This time there was good and bad,” she said. “Both Delroy Blane and Santorelli were wearing headsets with boom microphones, which is real damn good, much better than a hand-held. Those along with the overhead cockpit mike gave us three channels to study. On the bad side, the tape wasn’t new. It had been recorded over a lot of times and was more deteriorated than we would have liked. Worse, whatever the nature of the moisture that reached the tape, it had caused some patchy corrosion to the recording surface.”
From a back pocket of her jeans, she took a folded paper but didn’t immediately hand it to Joe.
She said, “When Minh Tran and the others listened, they found that some portions of the tape were clearly audible and others were so full of scratchy static, so garbled, they could only discern one out of four or five words.”
“What about the last minute?”
“That was one of the worst segments. It was decided that the tape would have to be cleaned and rehabilitated. Then the recording would be electronically enhanced to whatever extent possible. Bruce Laceroth, head of the Major Investigations Division, had been there to listen to the whole tape, and he called me in Pueblo, at a quarter past seven, Eastern Time, to tell me the status of the recording. They were stowing it for the night, going to start work with it again in the morning. It was depressing.”
High above them, the eagle returned from the east, pale against the pregnant bellies of the clouds, still flying straight and true with the weight of the pending storm on its wings.
“Of course, that whole day had been depressing,” Barbara said. “We’d brought in refrigerated trucks from Denver to collect all the human remains from the site, which had to be completed before we could begin to deal with the pieces of the plane itself. There was the usual organizational meeting, which is always exhausting, because so many interest groups—the airline, the manufacturer of the plane, the supplier of the power plants, the Airline Pilots Association, lots of others—all want to bend the proceedings to serve their interests as much as possible. Human nature—and not the prettier part of it. So you have to be reasonably diplomatic but also damn tough to keep the process truly impartial.”