Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  Jack laughed. They had to tell you it was “real meat” because, even though it was wrapped in clear plastic, you couldn’t tell what the hell it was by looking at it. Yes, sir—oh, yes—ham paste and real meat: That was why he had gone to Central America to fight for his country.

  He wished Jenny were alive and here with him. Real meat. As opposed to fake, polyester meat. She’d have gotten a kick out of that.

  When he walked out of the Mini-Mart, he paused to study the street again, but again he saw no one suspicious.

  He returned to the Cherokee at the dark end of the lot and put up the tailgate. He opened one of his suitcases, withdrew an empty nylon rucksack, the Beretta, a loaded clip, a box of .32 ammunition, and one of the pipe-type silencers. As his breath steamed from him in the cold air, he transferred the groceries from the paper bag to the rucksack. He screwed the silencer onto the gun, slammed the loaded clip into the butt. When he had distributed all the loose ammunition among the many pockets of his heavily insulated leather jacket, he closed the tailgate.

  Behind the wheel of the Cherokee once more, Jack put the Beretta on the seat beside him and set the rucksack on top of it for concealment. Using the new flashlight, he passed a few minutes studying the map of Elko County. When he switched the flashlight off and put the map away, he was ready to engage the enemy.

  For the next five minutes, he drove through Elko, using every trick he knew to reveal a tail, staying on quiet residential streets where traffic was light and where a surveillance team would be as obvious as a festering cold sore, no matter how good they were. Nothing.

  He parked at the end of a cul-de-sac and got an anti-surveillance broadband receiver from one of the suitcases. This device, the size of two packs of cigarettes, with a short antenna that telescoped out of the top, received all possible radio bands from 30 to 120, including FM from 88 to 108. If a transmitter had been fixed to the Jeep while he was in the market, enabling a tail to follow at a distance, his broadband receiver would pick up the signals; a feedback loop would cause the receiver to emit an ear-piercing squeal. He pointed the antenna at the Jeep and slowly circled the vehicle.

  The Cherokee had not been bugged.

  He put the broadband receiver away and got behind the wheel of the wagon again, where he sat for a minute in thought. He was under neither visual nor electronic surveillance. Did that make sense? When his adversaries put those Tranquility Motel postcards in his safe-deposit boxes, they must have known he would come to Nevada at once. Surely they also knew that he was a potentially dangerous man, and surely they would not allow him to plot against them on their own turf unobserved. Yet that seemed to be precisely what they were doing.

  Frowning, Jack twisted the key in the ignition. The engine roared.

  On the Lear from New York, he had pondered the situation at length and had arrived at several theories (most of them half-baked) as to the identity and intentions of his adversaries. Now he decided that nothing he dreamed up was half as strange as whatever was actually happening.

  No one was watching. That spooked him.

  The inexplicable always spooked him.

  When you couldn’t understand a situation, that usually meant you were missing something important. If you were missing something important, that meant you had a blind side. If you had a blind side, you could get your ass shot off when you were least expecting it.

  Alert, cautious, Jack Twist drove north from Elko on State Route 51. After a while, he turned west, following a series of gravel and dirt tracks, sneaking behind the Tranquility Motel instead of making an open approach on 1-80. Eventually he was reduced to traveling overland on sometimes dangerous terrain, from an elevation as high as four thousand feet, down across sloping foothills toward the plains. When the clouds parted, revealing a three-quarter moon, he switched off the headlights and continued, guided only by the glow of the lunar lamp, and his eyes soon adjusted to the night.

  Jack topped a rise and saw the Tranquility Motel, a lonely group of lights in a vast dark emptiness, a mile and a half below and southwest of him, this side of I-80. There were not as many lights as there ought to have been; either the place had little business or it was not open. He did not want to advertise his arrival, so he would proceed on foot.

  He left the Beretta in the Jeep and took the Uzi submachine gun. Actually, he did not expect trouble. Not yet. His adversaries, whoever the hell they were, had not teased him into coming all this way merely to kill him. They could have killed him in New York if that was all they wanted. Nevertheless, he was prepared for violence.

  In addition to the Uzi—and a spare magazine—he took the rucksack of groceries, a battery-powered directional microphone, and the Star Tron night-vision device. He pulled on gloves and a toboggan cap.

  Jack found the hike invigorating. The night was cold, and when the wind gusted, it stung but not unpleasantly.

  Because he’d expected to go to ground immediately upon arrival in Nevada, he had dressed suitably when he left New York. He wore high-topped hiking shoes with hard rubber soles and heavy tread, longjohns and jeans, a sweater, and a leather jacket with a thick quilted lining. The crew of the chartered Lear was surprised by his appearance, but they treated him as if he were in tuxedo and top hat; even an ugly man with one cast eye, dressed like an ordinary laborer, elicited respect when he could afford to lease a private jet rather than fly commercial airlines.

  Now Jack walked. Ragged tears in the clouds disrobed the moon, and the few widely scattered patches of snow shone brightly, as if they were shards of bone glimpsed in the darker carcass of the hump-backed hills; the bare earth, rock formations, sagebrush, and plentiful dry grass accepted the caress of moonlight and were limned in a vague milky-blond hue. But when the moon slipped behind the clouds, deep rich darkness flooded forth.

  At last he reached a suitable observation point on the southern slope of a hill, only a quarter of a mile behind the Tranquility Motel. He sat down, putting the Uzi and his rucksack aside.

  The Star Tron night-vision device took available light—starlight, moonlight, the natural phosphorescence of snow and of certain plants, meager electric light if any—and amplified it eighty-five thousand times. With the gadget’s single lens, Jack could transform all but the very blackest nights into gray daylight or better.

  He propped his elbows on his knees, held the Star Tron in both hands, and focused on the Tranquility. The rear of the structure popped into view with sufficient clarity for him to determine that no lookouts were posted in any shadowed niches. None of the motel units had windows along the back wall, so no guards could be watching from those rooms. The center third of the motel had a second floor, probably the owner’s apartment, and light shone at most of those windows. However, he could not see into the apartment because the drapes and blinds were drawn.

  He put the Star Tron in the rucksack and picked up the battery-powered, hand-held, directional microphone, which resembled a futuristic gun. Only a few years ago, “rifle mikes” were effective to a distance of only two hundred yards. But these days, a good power-amplified unit could suck in a conversation up to a quarter of a mile, much farther if conditions were ideal. The device included a pair of compact earphones, which he put on. He aimed the mike at a window shielded by drapes, and at once heard animated voices. However, he got only scraps of their conversation because he was trying to pull their voices out of a closed room and through a quarter-mile of blustery wind.

  With great caution, he grabbed the Uzi and other gear, and moved closer, choosing a second observation point less than a hundred yards from the building. When he aimed the mike at the window again, he picked up every word spoken beyond the glass, in spite of the muffling draperies. He heard six voices, maybe more. They were eating dinner and complimenting the cook (someone named Ned) and his helper (Sandy) on the turkey, the pecan stuffing, and other dishes.

  They’re not just eating dinner, Jack thought enviously, they’re having a damned banquet in there.

  H
e’d eaten a light lunch on the Lear but had taken nothing since. He was still on Eastern Standard Time, so for him it was almost eleven o’clock. He would probably be eavesdropping for hours, piecing together these people’s identities, gradually determining if they were his adversaries. He was too hungry to wait that long for his own dinner, such as it was. With a few rocks, he made a brace for the microphone to keep it angled toward the window. He unwrapped the Hamwich and bit into that “pulverized, blended, and remolded” treat. It tasted like sawdust soaked in rancid bacon fat. He spat out the gummy mouthful and settled down to a meager meal of dried beef and doughnuts, which would have been more satisfying if he had not had to listen to those strangers indulging in a modern version of a harvest feast.

  Soon, Jack had heard enough of the conversation in the apartment to know these people were not his enemies. Strangely, one way or another, they had been drawn or summoned here, as he’d been. Monitoring them, he began to think their voices were curiously familiar, and he was overcome with the feeling that he belonged among them as a brother among family.

  A woman named Ginger and a man—either Don or Dom—began to tell the others about research they’d done earlier in the offices of the Elko Sentinel. Listening to talk of toxic spills, roadblocks, and highly trained DERO troops, Jack felt his appetite fading. DERO! Shit, he’d heard about the DERO companies, though they’d been formed after he’d left the service. They were gung-ho types who’d happily accept an order to go into a pit against a grizzly bear, armed only with a meat grinder; and they were tough enough to make sausages out of the bear. Forced to choose between a quick, painless suicide and hand-to-hand combat with a DERO, the ordinary man would be well-advised to blow his own brains out and save himself pain. Jack realized he was involved in something far bigger and more dangerous than fratellanza revenge or any of the other things he had hypothesized during his flight from New York.

  Although the picture he got from eavesdropping was full of holes, he began to grasp that these people had come together to discover what had happened to them the summer before last, the same weekend Jack had stayed here. They’d made considerable headway in their investigation, and Jack winced as they openly discussed their progress. They were so naive that they thought closed doors and covered windows ensured privacy. He wanted to shout: Hey, for God’s sake, shut up already! If I can hear you, they can hear you.

  DERO. That bit of news made him even sicker than the Hamwich.

  In the motel they continued to chatter, revealing their strategy to the enemy even as they worked it out, and at last Jack tore off the earphones, frantically grabbed his guns and equipment, and hurried down through the darkness toward the Tranquility Motel.

  The apartment had no dining room, just the alcove in the kitchen, but that area was too small to seat nine. In the living room, they moved the furniture against the walls, brought in the kitchen table, and used both extra leaves to extend it, accommodating everyone. To Dom, the impromptu arrangements contributed to the feeling of a family gathering and to the mood of cautious festivity.

  Rather than have to repeat themselves, Dom and Ginger had waited until dinner, when the group was gathered, to report on their research at the newspaper in Elko. Now, over the clinking of silverware, they revealed that the Army had blockaded 1-80 minutes before the toxic spill that Friday night. Which meant that choppers full of soldiers had been dispatched from distant Shenkfield at least half an hour earlier, and that the Army knew in advance the “accident” was going to happen.

  Tearing a crescent roll, Dom said, “If Falkirk and a DERO company flew in and took over security on the quarantine line so soon after the crisis hit ... well, it means the Army must’ve had advance warning.”

  “But then why didn’t they stop it from happening?” Jorja Monatella asked as she cut her daughter’s serving of turkey into bite-size pieces.

  “Apparently, they couldn’t stop it,” Dom said.

  “Maybe there was a terrorist attack on the truck, and maybe Army Intelligence only got wind of it just before it went down,” Ernie said.

  “Maybe,” Dom said doubtfully. “But they would’ve gone public with that kind of story if it happened. So it must’ve been something else. Something involving top-secret data of such importance that only DERO troops could be trusted to keep quiet about it.”

  Brendan Cronin had a heartier appetite than anyone at the table, but his temporal appetite did not diminish the spiritual air that had surrounded him. He swallowed some baked corn and said, “This explains why there weren’t hundreds of people on those ten miles of interstate when the thing happened, as there should’ve been at that hour. If the Army sealed it off ahead of the event, they had time to get most traffic out of the danger zone before anything actually happened.”

  Dom said, “Some didn’t get out, saw too much, and were held and brainwashed with the rest of us who were already here at the motel.”

  For a while everyone joined in the discussion and arrived at all the same theories and unanswerable questions that had occurred to Dom and Ginger at the newspaper offices earlier in the day.

  Finally, Dom told them about the important discovery he and Ginger had made when, as an afterthought, they had looked through issues of the Sentinel published during the weeks following the toxic spill. When they had finished poring through editions for the week of the crisis, Ginger had suggested that clues to the secret of what really happened on the closed highway that night might be hidden in other news, in unusual stories that appeared to have nothing to do with the crisis but were, in fact, related to it. They pulled more issues from the files, and by studying every story from a paranoid perspective, they soon found what they hoped for. One place in particular figured in the news in such a way that it seemed linked to the closure of 1-80.

  “Thunder Hill,” Dom said. “We believe that’s where our trouble came from. Shenkfield was just a ruse, a clever misdirection to focus attention away from the real source of the crisis. Thunder Hill.”

  Faye and Ernie looked up from their plates in surprise, and Faye said, “Thunder Hill’s ten or twelve miles north-northeast of here, in the mountains. The Army has an installation up there, too—the Thunder Hill Depository. There’re natural limestone caves in those hills, where they store copies of service records and a lot of other important files, so they won’t lose all copies if military bases in other parts of the country are wiped out in a disaster ... nuclear war, like that.”

  Ernie said, “The Depository was here before Faye and me. Twenty years or more. Rumors have it that files and records aren’t the only things in storage there. Some believe there’s also huge supplies of food, medicines, weapons, ammunition. Which makes sense. In case a big war breaks out, the Army wouldn’t want all its weapons and supplies on ordinary military bases because those would be the first nuked. They’ve surely got fallback caches, and I guess Thunder Hill is one of those.”

  “Then anything might be up there,” Jorja Monatella said uneasily.

  “Anything,” Ned Sarver said.

  “Is it possible the place isn’t just a storage dump?” Sandy asked. “Could they also maybe be doing some kind of experiments up there?”

  “What kind of experiments?” Brendan asked, leaning over to look past Ned, beside whom he was seated.

  Sandy shrugged. “Any kind.”

  “It’s possible,” Dom said. The same thought had occurred to him.

  “But if there wasn’t a toxic spill on 1-80, if it was something at Thunder Hill that went wrong,” Ginger said, “how could it have affected us, more than ten miles to the south?”

  No one could think of an answer.

  Marcie, who had been preoccupied with her moon collection for most of the evening and who had said nothing during dinner, put down her fork and piped up with a question of her own: “Why’s it called Thunder Hill?”

  “Sweetie,” Faye said, “that’s one I can answer. Thunder Hill’s really one of four huge, connecting mountain meadows, a long s
loping piece of high pastureland. It’s surrounded by a great many high peaks, and during a storm, the place acts like a sort of ... well, a sort of funnel for sound. The Indians named it Thunder Hill hundreds of years ago because thunder echoes between those peaks and rolls down the mountain-sides, and it all pours in on that one particular meadow in a most peculiar way, so that it seems as if the roar isn’t coming out of the sky, but as if it’s coming right up out of the ground around you.”

  “Wow,” Marcie said softly. “I’d probably pee my pants.”

  “Marcie!” Jorja said as everyone broke into laughter.

  “Well, gee, I probably would,” the child replied. “You ’member when Grandma and Grandpa came over to dinner at our place, and there was a big storm, really big, and some lightning struck the tree in our yard, and there was this boom! and I peed my pants?” Looking around the table at her new extended family, she said, “I was soooo embarrassed.”

  Everyone laughed again, and Jorja said, “That was more than two years ago. You’re a bigger girl now.”

  To Dom, Ernie said, “You haven’t told us yet why Thunder Hill is the place, rather than Shenkfield. What’d you find in the newspaper?”

  In the Sentinel for Friday, July 13, exactly one week after the closure of 1-80 and three days after its reopening, there was a report of two county ranchers—Norvil Brust and Jake Dirkson—who were having trouble with the Federal Bureau of Land Management. A disagreement between ranchers and the BLM was not unusual. The government owned half of Nevada, not merely deserts but a lot of the best grazing land, some of which it leased to cattlemen for their herds. Ranchers were always complaining that the BLM kept too much good land out of use, that the government ought to sell off part of its holdings to private interests, and that leases were too expensive. But Brust and Dirkson had a new complaint. For years they leased BLM land surrounding a three-hundred-acre Army installation, the Thunder Hill Depository. Brust held eight hundred acres to the west and south, and Dirkson was using over seven hundred acres on the east side of Thunder Hill. Suddenly, on Saturday morning, July 7, though four years remained on Brust’s and Dirkson’s leases, the BLM took five hundred acres from Brust, three hundred from Dirkson; and at the request of the Army, those eight hundred acres were incorporated into the boundaries of the Thunder Hill Depository.

  “Which just happens to be the very morning after the toxic spill and the closure of I-80,” Faye observed.

  “Brust and Dirkson showed up Saturday morning to inspect their herds, per their usual routine,” Dom said, “and both discovered that their livestock had been driven off most of the leased pasture. A temporary barbed-wire fence was being thrown into place along the new perimeter of the Thunder Hill Depository.”

  Having finished dinner, Ginger pushed her plate aside and said, “The BLM simply told Brust and Dirkson it was unilaterally abrogating their leases, without compensation. But they didn’t receive an official written notice till the following Wednesday, which is extremely unusual. Ordinarily, a notice of termination comes sixty days in advance.”

  “Was that kind of treatment legal?” Brendan Cronin asked.

  “Right there’s the problem of doing business with the government,” Ernie told the priest. “You’re dealing with the very people who decide what’s legal and what isn’t. It’s like playing poker with God.”

  Faye said, “The BLM’s despised around these parts. No bunch of bureaucrats is more high-handed.”

  “That’s what we gathered from reading the Sentinel,” Dom said. “Now, Ginger and I might’ve figured the Thunder Hill business was just coincidental, that the BLM just happened to go after that land the same time as the crisis on 1-80. But the way the government dealt with Brust and Dirkson after the land was seized was so extraordinary it made us suspicious. When the ranchers hired attorneys, when stories about the cancellation of their leases began appearing in the Sentinel, the BLM did a sudden about-face and offered compensation, after all.”

  “That’s not a bit like the BLM!” Ernie said. “They’ll always make you drag them into court, hoping litigation will wear you down.”

  “How much were they willing to pay Brust and Dirkson?” Faye asked.

  “The figure wasn’t revealed,” Ginger said. “But it was evidently darned good, because Brust and Dirkson accepted it overnight.”

  “So the BLM bought their silence,” Jorja said.

  “I think it was the Army working secretly through the BLM,” Dom said. “They realized the longer the story was in the news, the more chance there was of someone wondering about a link between the crisis on 1-80 that Friday night and the unorthodox seizure of land the very next morning, even if the two events were ten or twelve miles apart.”

  “Surprises me somebody didn’t make the connection,” Jorja said. “If you and Ginger could spot it this long after the fact, why didn’t anyone think of it then?”

  “For one thing,” Ginger said, “Dom and I had the enormous benefit of hindsight. We know there was a lot more going on during the days of the crisis than anyone suspected at the time. So we were specifically looking for connections. But that July, all the hoopla about a toxic spill diverted attention from Thunder Hill. Furthermore, there was nothing extraordinary about ranchers fighting the BLM, so nothing in the situation linked it in anyone’s mind with the 1-80 quarantine. In fact, when the BLM made that totally out-of-character offer to Brust and Dirkson, a Sentinel editorial praised the repentant attitude of the government and prophesied a new age of reason.”

  “But from what you’ve told us,” Dom said to Faye and Ernie, “and from what else we’ve read, that was the first and last time the Bureau of Land Management dealt reasonably with ranchers. So it wasn’t a new policy—just a one-time response to a crisis. And it’s too coincidental to believe that the crisis evolving at Thunder Hill was unrelated to the crisis simultaneously under way here along the interstate.”

  “Besides,” Ginger said, “once our suspicion was aroused, we got to thinking that if the trouble that night had been related to Shenkfield, there’d have been no need for the Army to use DERO troops for security. Because the soldiers stationed at Shenkfield would already have full security clearance in all matters related to that base, and there would’ve been nothing about a Shenkfield crisis too sensitive for them to see. The only reason DERO would’ve been called in is if the crisis was utterly unrelated to Shenkfield, involving something the soldiers at that base were not cleared for.”

  “So if there’re answers to our problems,” Brendan said, “we’ll most likely find them at the Thunder Hill Depository.”

  “We already suspected the story about a spill was less than half true,” Dom said. “Maybe there was no truth to it at all. Maybe the crisis had nothing to do with Shenkfield. If the real source was Thunder Hill, the rest was just smoke they blew in the public’s eyes.”

  “It sure feels right,” Ernie said. He had finished dinner, too. His silverware was neatly arranged on the plate, which was almost as clean as before dinner, evidence that his military discipline and order had not departed him. “You know, part of my service career was in Marine Intelligence, so I’m speaking with some experience when I say this Shenkfield stuff truly does smack of an elaborate cover-story.”

  Ned’s frown exaggerated his pronounced widow’s peak. “There’re a couple of things I don’t understand. The quarantine didn’t extend from Thunder Hill all the way down here. There were miles of territory in between that weren’t sealed off. So how did the effects of an accident on Thunder Hill leap-frog over all that distance and come down on our heads, without causing trouble between there and here?”

  “You’re not dull-witted,” Dom said. “I can’t explain it, either.”

  Still frowning, Ned said, “Another thing: The Depository doesn’t need a lot of land, does it? From what I’ve heard, it’s underground. They’ve got a couple of big blast-doors in the side of the hill, a road leading up to the doors, maybe a guard post, and that’s it.
The three hundred acres you mentioned—the area around the entrance—is plenty big enough for a security zone. So why the land-grab?”

  Dom shrugged. “Beats me. But whatever the hell happened up there on July sixth, it prompted two emergency actions on the part of the Army: first, a temporary quarantine down here, ten or twelve miles away, until we witnesses could be dealt with; second, an immediate enlargement of the security zone around the Depository, up there in the mountains; a secondary quarantine that’s still in