by Dean Koontz
With the taste of peppermint schnapps on his tongue and the scent burning his sinuses, Brendan said, “That’s where I’m being called. Last night, in the dream, though I still saw nothing but a brilliant light, I suddenly knew where I was. Elko County, Nevada. And I knew I must go back there in order to find an explanation for Emmy’s cure and Winton’s resurrection.”
“Back there? You’ve been there before?”
“The summer before last. Just before I came to St. Bernadette’s.”
Upon leaving his post with Monsignor Orbella in Rome, Brendan had flown directly to San Francisco to carry out a final assignment from his Vatican mentor. He stayed two weeks with Bishop John Santefiore, an old friend of Orbella. The bishop was writing a book on the history of papal selection, and Brendan came laden with research material provided by the monsignor in Rome. It was his job to answer any questions about those documents. John Santefiore was a charming man with a sly dry wit, and the days flashed past.
His task concluded, Brendan was left with two weeks to himself before he was required to report to his superiors in Chicago, his hometown, where he would be assigned as curate to some parish in that archdiocese. He spent a few days in Carmel, on the Monterey Peninsula. Then, making up his mind to see some of the country that he had never seen before, Brendan set out on a long drive eastward in a rental car.
Now, Father Wycazik leaned forward, brandy snifter clasped in both hands. “I remembered about Bishop Santefiore, but I’d forgotten you drove from there to here. And you passed through Elko County, Nevada?”
“Stayed there, at a motel in the middle of nowhere. Tranquility Motel. I stopped for the night, but it was so peaceful, the countryside so beautiful, that I stayed a few days. Now I’ve got to go back.”
“Why? What happened to you out there?”
Brendan shrugged. “Nothing. I just relaxed. Napped. Read a couple books. Watched TV. They have good TV reception even way out there because they’ve got their own little receiver dish on the roof.”
Father Wycazik cocked his head. “What’s wrong? There for a moment you sounded ... odd. Wooden ... as if repeating something you’d memorized.”
“I was just telling you what it was like.”
“So if nothing happened to you there, why is the place so special? What will happen when you go back there?”
“I’m not sure. But it’s going to be something ... incredible.”
Finally revealing his frustration with his curate’s obtuseness, Father Wycazik put the question bluntly: “Is it God calling you?”
“I don’t think so. But maybe. A slim maybe. Father, I want your permission to go. But if I can’t have your blessing, I’ll go anyway.”
Father Wycazik took a larger swallow of brandy than was his habit. “I think you should go, but I don’t think you should go alone.”
Brendan was surprised. “You want to come with me?”
“Not me. I’ve got St. Bette’s to run. But you should be in the company of a qualified witness. A priest familiar with these things, one who can verify any miracle or miraculous visitation—”
“You mean some cleric who has the Cardinal’s imprimatur to investigate every hysterical report of weeping statues of the Holy Mother, bleeding crucifixes, and divine manifestations of all kinds.”
Father Wycazik nodded. “That’s right. Someone who knows the process of authentication. I had in mind Monsignor Janney of the archdiocese’s office of publications. He’s had a lot of practice.”
Reluctant to disappoint his rector but determined to proceed in his own fashion, Brendan interrupted: “There’s no visitation involved here, so there’s no need for Monsignor Janney. None of this has an obvious Christian significance or source.”
“And who ever said God isn’t permitted to be subtle?” Father Wycazik asked. His grin made it clear he expected to win this argument.
“These things could all be merely psychic phenomena.”
“Bah! Claptrap. Psychic phenomena are just the nonbeliever’s pathetic explanation for glimpses of the divine hand at work. Examine these events closely, Brendan; open your heart to the meaning of them, and you’ll see the truth. God’s calling you back to His bosom. And I believe a divine visitation is what this may be building toward.”
“But if this is building to a divine manifestation, why couldn’t it happen right here? Why’s it necessary to go all the way to Nevada?”
“Perhaps it’s a test of your obedience to the will of God, a test of your underlying desire to believe again. If your desire’s strong enough, you’ll discomfit yourself by taking this long journey, and as reward you’ll be shown something to make you believe again.”
“But why Nevada? Why not Florida or Texas—or Istanbul?”
“Only God knows.”
“And why would God go to all this trouble to recapture the heart of one fallen priest?”
“To Him who made the earth and stars, this is no trouble at all. And one heart is as important to Him as a million hearts.”
“Then why did He let me lose my faith in the first place?”
“Perhaps losing and regaining it is a tempering process. You may have been put through it because God needs you to be stronger.”
Brendan smiled and shook his head in admiration. “You’re never caught without an answer, are you, Father?”
Looking self-satisfied, Stefan Wycazik settled back in his chair. “God blessed me with a quick tongue.”
Brendan was aware of Father Wycazik’s reputation as a savior of troubled priests, and he knew the rector would not give up easily—or at all. But Brendan was determined not to go to Nevada with Monsignor Janney in tow.
From the other armchair, over the rim of his brandy snifter, Father Wycazik watched Brendan with evident affection and iron determination, waiting eagerly for another argument that he could swiftly refute, for another thrust that he could parry with his unfailing Jesuitical aplomb.
Brendan sighed. It was going to be a long evening.
Elko County, Nevada.
After hurrying out of the Tranquility Grille in fear and confusion, into the last fading scarlet and purple light of dusk, Dom Corvaisis went directly to the motel office. There, he walked into the middle of a scene that initially appeared to be a domestic quarrel, though he quickly saw that it was something stranger than that.
A squarely built man in tan slacks and a brown sweater stood in the center of the room, this side of the counter. He was only two inches taller than Dom, but in other dimensions he was considerably larger. He seemed to have been hewn from massive slabs of oak. The gray of his brush-cut hair, the weathered lines of his face, indicated he was in his fifties, although his bull-strong body had a younger presence and power.
The big man was shaking, as if enraged. A woman stood beside him, staring up at him with an odd and urgent expression. She was a blond with vivid blue eyes, younger than him, though it was difficult to judge her age. The man’s pale face was shiny with sweat. As Dom stepped across the threshold, he realized that his flash impression was wrong: This guy was not enraged but terrified.
“Relax,” the woman said. “Try to control your breathing.”
The big man was gasping. He stood with his thick neck bent, head lowered, shoulders hunched, staring at the floor, inhalation following exhalation in an arhythmic pattern that betrayed a growing panic.
“Take deep slow breaths,” the woman said. “Remember what Dr. Fontelaine taught you. When you’re calm, we’ll go outside for a walk.”
“No!” the big man said, shaking his head violently.
“Yes, we will,” the woman said, putting a reassuring hand on his arm. “We’ll go outside for a walk, Ernie, and you’ll see that this darkness is no different from the darkness in Milwaukee.”
Ernie. The name chilled Dom and immediately brought to mind those four posters of the moon on which names had been scrawled in Zebediah Lomack’s living room, in Reno.
The woman glanced at Dom, and he said, “
I need a room.”
“We’re full,” she said.
“The vacancy sign is lit.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay, but not now. Please. Not now. Go over to the diner or something. Come back in half an hour. Please.”
Until that exchange, Ernie had seemed unaware of Dom’s intrusion. Now, he looked up from the floor, and a moan of fear and despair escaped him. “The door. Close it before the darkness comes in!”
“No, no, no,” the woman told him, her voice firm yet full of compassion. “It’s not coming in. Darkness can’t hurt you, Ernie.”
“It’s coming in,” he insisted miserably.
Dom realized that the room was unnaturally bright. Table lamps, a floor lamp, a desk lamp, and the ceiling fixtures blazed.
The woman turned to Dom again. “For God’s sake, close the door.”
He stepped in, rather than out, and shut the door behind him.
“I meant, close it as you leave,” the woman said pointedly.
The expression on Ernie’s face was part terror, part embarrassment. His eyes shifted from Dom to the window. “It’s right there at the glass. All the darkness ... pressing, pressing.” He looked sheepishly at Dom, then lowered his head again, shut his eyes tight.
Dom stood transfixed. Ernie’s irrational fear was horribly like the terror which drove Dom to walk in his sleep and to hide in closets.
Using anger to repress her tears, the woman turned to Dom. “Why won’t you go? He’s nyctophobic. He’s afraid of the dark sometimes, and when he has one of these attacks, we have to work it out together.”
Dom remembered the other names scrawled on the posters in Lomack’s house—Ginger, Faye—and he chose one by instinct. “It’s all right, Faye. I think I understand a little of what you’re going through.”
She blinked in surprise when he used her name. “Do I know you?”
“Do you? I’m Dominick Corvaisis.”
“Means nothing to me,” she said, staying with the big man as he turned and, eyes still closed, shuffled toward the back of the office.
Ernie moved blindly toward the gate in the counter. “Got to get upstairs, where I can pull the drapes, keep the dark out.”
Faye said, “No, Ernie, wait. Don’t run from it.”
Stepping in front of Ernie, putting a hand on the man’s chest to halt him, Dom said, “You have nightmares. When you wake up, you can’t remember what they were, except they had something to do with the moon.”
Faye gasped.
Ernie opened his eyes in surprise. “How’d you know that?”
“I’ve had nightmares for over a month,” Dom said. “Every night. And I know a man who suffered from them so bad he killed himself.”
They stared at him in astonishment.
“In October,” Dom said, “I started walking in my sleep. I’d creep out of bed, hide in closets, or gather weapons to protect myself. Once, I tried to nail the windows shut to keep something out. Don’t you see, Ernie, I’m afraid of something in the dark. I’ll bet that’s what you’re afraid of, too. Not just the dark itself but something else, something specific that happened to you”—he gestured toward the windows—“out there in the darkness on that same weekend, the summer before last.”
Still baffled by this turn of events, Ernie glanced at the night beyond the windows, then immediately looked away. “I don’t understand.”
“Let’s go upstairs, where you can draw the drapes,” Dom said. “I’ll tell you what I know. The important thing is you aren’t alone in this. You’re not alone any more. And, thank God, neither am I.”
New Haven County, Connecticut.
Clockwork. Jack Twist’s heists always ticked along like clockwork mechanisms. The armored-car job was no exception.
The night was solidly roofed with clouds. No stars, no moon. No snow was falling, but a cold moist wind swept up from the southwest.
The Guardmaster truck rumbled past empty fields, coming from the northeast toward the knoll from which Jack had watched it Christmas Eve. Its headlights bored through thin ragged sheets of patchy winter fog. In the snow-wrapped fields, the county lane resembled a strip of black satin ribbon.
Dressed in a white ski suit with hood, Jack lay half buried in snow, south of the roadway, across from the knoll. On the other side of the road, at the foot of the knoll, the second member of the team, Chad Zepp, also in white camouflage, sprawled in another drift.
The third member of the team, Branch Pollard, was halfway down the knoll with a Heckler and Koch HK91 heavy assault rifle.
The truck was two hundred yards away. Refracting the headlights, fog formations drifted across the road, into the lightless fields.
Suddenly the muzzle of the HK91 flashed up on the hillside. A shot cracked above the sound of the grinding engine.
The HK91, perhaps the finest combat rifle made, could fire hundreds of rounds without jamming. Extremely accurate, effective at a thousand yards, the HK91 could put a 7.62 NATO round through a tree or concrete wall, with sufficient punch left to kill someone on the other side.
Tonight, however, they did not intend to kill anyone. Aided by an infra-red telescopic sight, Pollard put the first shot where he wanted it, blowing out the right front tire of the Guardmaster transport.
The truck swerved wildly. Encountering ice, it began to slide.
Even while the armored transport was sliding, its fate unsettled, Jack was up and running. He leaped a ditch and dashed onto the road in front of the vehicle, which loomed like a tank. At the last moment, when it seemed bound inexorably for the ditch, the driver regained control and brought the truck to a jerky halt thirty feet from Jack.
He saw one of the Guardmaster crewmen talking excitedly into a radio handset. That call for help was futile. The moment Pollard had fired from the knoll, Chad Zepp, still concealed in the snow north of the road, had switched on a battery-powered transmitter, jamming the transport’s radio frequency with shrill electronic static.
As the rising wind harried fog-ghosts past Jack, he stood in the middle of the road, feeling naked in the blazing headlights, taking time to aim the tear-gas rifle at the truck’s grille. The gun was of British manufacture, designed for anti-terrorist squads. Other tear-gas weapons fired grenades that spewed disabling fumes on impact, requiring the marksman to aim at windows. But upon seizing an embassy, terrorists usually boarded up the windows. The new British gun, which Jack had acquired from a black-market arms dealer in Miami, had a two-inch bore and fired a high-velocity, steel-jacketed tear-gas shell that could penetrate most wooden doors or punch through a boarded window. When Jack fired, the shell smashed through the truck’s grille into the engine compartment. A noxious yellow vapor began roiling into the cab by way of its ventilation system.
The guards had been trained to remain in their secure roost in a crisis, for the cab had steel doors and bulletproof glass. But when they switched off the heater and closed the vents too late, they found themselves choking in the gas-filled cabin. They opened their locked doors, spilled out into the cold winter night, wheezing, coughing.
In spite of the blinding, suffocating gas, the driver had drawn his revolver. Dropping to his knees, gagging, he squinted his copiously watering eyes in search of a target.
But Jack kicked the gun out of his hand, grabbed him by the coat, and dragged him to the front of the truck, where he handcuffed him to a support strut on the bumper.
After firing the shot that disabled the truck, Branch Pollard had sprinted down the knoll. Now, at the other end of the front bumper, he handcuffed the other protesting guard to another strut.
Both guards were blinking furiously, trying to clear their gas-blurred vision to get a look at their attackers’ faces, but that was wasted effort because Jack, Pollard, and Zepp were wearing ski masks.
Leaving the securely shackled men, Jack and Pollard ran to the back of the truck, moving fast, though not because they feared being seen by other traffic on that lonely road. No traffic would pass until they
were gone. The moment the Guardmaster unit had entered the flats, the last two members of the robbery team, Hart and Dodd, had sealed off both ends of the road with stolen vans that had been repainted and equipped with Department of Highway signs. Against an impressive backdrop of emergency beacons flashing on the roofs of their vans and on sawhorses they had set out on the pavement, Dodd and Hart would turn back everyone who wanted through, spinning a tale of a tanker-truck accident.
Clockwork.
When Jack and Pollard got to the rear of the truck, Chad Zepp was already there. In the glow of a battery-powered light that he had fixed to the truck with a magnet, Zepp was unscrewing the faceplate that covered the lock mechanism on the doors to the cargo hold.
They had brought explosives, but when trying to peel a truck as well-constructed as the Guardmaster, there was a risk that explosives would fuse the lock pins, sealing the hon-eypot even tighter. They had to try going in through the lock, leaving explosives as a last resort.
Some older armored cars had locks that operated with a key or pair of keys, and some had combination dials, but this was a new vehicle with state-of-the-art equipment. This lock was engaged and disengaged by pressing a sequence of code numbers on a ten-digit keyboard that was the size and appearance of the “dial” on a touch-tone telephone. To activate the lock, the guard closed the doors and simply punched in the middle number of the three-number code. To deactivate it, he pressed all three numbers in the correct order. The code was changed every morning, and of the two men crewing the truck, only the driver knew it.
There were one thousand possible three-number sequences in ten digits. Because it would take between four and five seconds to key in each sequence and wait for it to be accepted or rejected, they would have to delay at least an hour and a quarter to try every combination. That was far too risky.
Chad Zepp removed the faceplate from the lock. The ten numbered buttons remained, but now it was possible to see a bit of the mechanism between and behind them.
Hung on a strap from Zepp’s shoulder was a battery-powered, attaché-sized computer, which could assess and control the circuitry of electronic locks and alarms. It was SLICKS, an acronym for Security Lock Intervention and Circumvention Knowledge System. Intended solely for military or intelligence-agency personnel with security clearance, SLICKS was unavailable to the public. Unauthorized possession was a criminal violation of the Defense Security Act. To obtain a SLICKS, Jack had gone to Mexico City and had paid twenty-five thousand dollars to a black-market arms dealer who had a contact inside the firm that manufactured the device.
Zepp unslung the computer and held it so he and Jack and Pollard could see the four-inch-square video display, which was dark. Three retractable probes were slotted in the SLICKS, and Jack withdrew the first of these from its niche: It looked like a copper-tipped steel thermometer on a two-foot wire umbilical. Jack looked closely at the partially exposed guts of the electronic lock and carefully inserted the slender probe between the first two buttons, touching it to the contact point at the base of the button marked “1.” The display screen remained dark. He moved the probe to button number 2, then 3. Nothing. But when he touched number 4, a pale green word—CURRENT—appeared on the screen, plus numbers that measured trace-electricity in the contact.
This meant that the middle number of the three-digit lock-code was 4. After loading sacks of money and checks into the cargo-hold at the last stop on the route, the driver had pushed 4 to activate the lock. The contact point of that button would remain closed until the entire code was punched in, thereby unlocking the door.
With three unknown numbers, the possible combinations had been one thousand. But now that they needed to find only the first and last numbers, the search was reduced to one hundred combinations.
Ignoring the howling wind, Jack withdrew another instrument from the SLICKS. This was also on a two-foot cord but resembled a watercolor brush though with a single bristle. The bristle glowed with light and was thicker than a sixty-pound fishing line, stiff yet flexible. Jack inserted it into a crack at the base of the 1 button on the lock keyboard, glanced at the computer video display, but was not rewarded. He moved the bristle-probe from number to number. The display screen blinked, then showed a partial diagram of a circuit board.
The bristle that he had thrust inside the mechanism was actually the end filament of an optical laser, a more sophisticated cousin of the similar device which, in supermarket cash registers, read the bar codes on grocery items. The SLICKS was not programmed to read bar codes but to recognize circuitry patterns and render models of them on the display screen. The screen would register nothing whatsoever until the bristle-probe was aimed directly at a circuit or portion thereof, but then it would faithfully reproduce the hidden pattern that it saw.
Jack had to move the probe three times, insert it into the lock mechanism at three different points, before the computer was able to piece together a picture of the entire circuitry from partial views. The diagram glowed in bright green lines and symbols on the miniature video display. After three seconds of consideration, the computer drew boxes around two small portions of the diagram to indicate those points at which a tap could easily be applied to the circuitry. Then it superimposed an image of the ten-digit keyboard over the diagram, to show where those two weak points were in relation to that portion of the lock mechanism that was visible to Jack.
“There’s a good tap-in spot below the number four button,” Jack said.