The Forbidden Door

by Dean Koontz

  26

  IVAN PETRO DOWN ON ONE knee behind a tree, maintaining a low profile, possessed of a Zen master’s patience, passionate about the revolution, his fierce ambition fueled by bitter envy of those fools above him in the Arcadian ranks, smarter than them, able to quote long passages of Nietzsche and Weber and Freud word for word…

  In spite of his superior qualities and advantages, he wonders if he should call for assistance after all, let others know that he has found Jane Hawk. He is uneasy when he recalls with what alacrity she escaped the 12-gauge Taser.

  No, she’s just a woman, a former FBI agent trained at Quantico, all right, but still only a woman. Ivan is not one of those men who has no use for women. He has a use for them, one use, and he often uses them well, until they beg for surcease. He’s not going to back away from this golden opportunity, not back away for backup. She is his ticket to the top. She belongs to him. She and her boy are his.

  He waits and listens.

  His left hand aches from the hammer blow, two skinned knuckles oozing a thin bloody serum, fingers beginning to swell and grow stiff. His pistol is in his right hand.

  Twenty feet east of him, Jane is betrayed by a clatter and prolonged rustle, loose stones and dry leaves sliding downhill.

  He turns toward the noise.

  27

  THE LIVE OAKS WERE OLD, rooted in centuries, and most of their lowest limbs hung well above her head. The trick was to throw the stones hard and far, as high as possible to gain distance, but not so high that they were dropped short by an intervening limb. She stepped out from shelter, hoping he wasn’t looking this way. She threw one stone, the second, grabbed the Taser XREP, and plummeted downhill in long, wild strides, making some noise that perhaps was covered by whatever racket her two missiles produced, fearful of a bullet but exhilarated because action was better than paralysis.

  She passed one tree and skidded to a halt behind the next. A foot in front of her, an inpour of sunshine pooled on a drift of dead leaves. She stooped and, with her butane lighter, set the leaves ablaze.

  There was no danger of a catastrophic forest fire; only an isolated grove of thirty or forty trees leafed through the glen. They were old, magnificent. It would be sad if they burned beyond recovery. But if she had to devastate the entire woodlet to save herself and her son, she would have no regret.

  She rose, pocketed the lighter, and drew her pistol. With Taser in her left hand and Heckler in her right, she moved fast through the shrouding gloom, before the fire could flare bright enough to reveal her. Running, she squeezed off four rounds, counting on the reports and their echoes to cover what other sounds she made, aiming west, at nothing, so the muzzle flare wouldn’t be evident to him where he waited to the east of her. The crack of gunfire echoed off the walls of the glen, off the trees, making it hard to determine from which direction the shots issued, encouraging him to believe that she’d spotted him and that he needed to keep his head down.

  At the foot of the slope, on the floor of the glen, Jane looked back and saw reflections of the flames fluttering among the trees, pulsing shadows interleaved with those wings of light. The blaze was already bright enough to draw her enemy’s attention and distract him if he raised his head.

  She hurried east, avoiding shafts of incoming sunshine, glad that she was wearing dark colors, staying low as she raced toward the Range Rover, firing another six rounds to the west.

  28

  SOMEWHERE EAST OF IVAN PETRO, the clatter of dislodged stones carries with it a rustling mass of dead oak leaves.

  He steps out from the tree where he’s been sheltering and scans the shaded glen. In the direction from which the sound arose, the bosky murk is deep, pierced by a few thin golden stalks of sunlight illuminating little, like the stems of radiant flowers that rise through the oak canopy to bloom out of sight above the trees.

  The crack of a pistol reminds him that Jane was at the top of her class in marksmanship at Quantico. He drops to the ground in a crackle of dried weeds, a disturbance of gnats swarming his nose and teasing from him a single, regretted sneeze. He lies flat through three more shots, the sounds ricocheting from glen wall to glen wall, the sound suppressed and diffused by the trees.

  After a silence, Ivan is about to lift his head to reconnoiter when she starts shooting again. Six rounds in rapid succession. The large number of shots convinces him that he isn’t the target, that she doesn’t have a fix on his position. Supposing she prefers a pistol with a standard ten-round capacity, she has just emptied the magazine without a target in sight, which means her purpose must be to keep his head down while she moves from one place to another.

  She has spare magazines.

  Spare magazines and a plan.

  As he rises to his knees, his attention is drawn at once to the fire. Fifty or sixty feet to the west. Midway between the bottom of the glen and its north rim. A low, bright riffle of flames spreads not because of a breeze, for the air is still, but because it feeds on the rich fuel of dead leaves and weeds. Suddenly the fire leaps as high as two feet, flailing the nearby trees with orange light, and a snake of pale smoke uncoils like a cobra swaying to a flute.

  This is a distraction, just as were the ten shots she fired. Just as were the rattling stones and the slithering leafslide that had for a moment drawn his attention eastward.

  Distraction from what?

  29

  AT THE BOTTOM OF THE glen, Jane crouched on the south side of the Range Rover, screened from her adversary, wherever he might be on the north slope. She put down the Taser XREP. She ejected the depleted magazine from the Heckler and snapped a fresh one into place and holstered the gun.

  Success now depended on speed, disconcerting the big man with another development while he was still trying to decide what to make of the first fire and the gunshots, before he committed to some course of action that she didn’t want him to take.

  She flipped open the small port on the rear quarter panel of the Rover and twisted the cap off the fuel tank. She withdrew the knotted socks from the front of her jeans and stuffed them into the gas tank filler neck, using the stiff plastic zip-tie to work them into the tank itself. When the gasoline began to travel by exosmosis through the socks, she could smell the fumes swelling in strength.

  She waited until the fabric ought to be saturated. Gripping the dry end of the stiff plastic zip-tie, she pulled the makeshift torch out of the tank, being careful to avoid dripping fuel on herself, taking care not to get any whatsoever on her right hand. Shut the tank cap. Closed the flip door.

  Turning away from the Rover, she peered into the darkest portion of the glen: the nearby section of the south slope leading upward under a dense thatching of limbs and leaves. The land seemed less steep here than on the north wall of the glen, but the footing could still be treacherous.

  With the rim of the glen defined by a narrow, ragged band of light far ahead, with blackness close on all sides, she ascended, dangling the dripping mass of cotton socks at arm’s length, to her left side. There seemed to be no grass or weeds here where the sun seldom penetrated. Oak-tree sheddings crunched underfoot, but she thought her would-be captor must be too far away to hear. Although surface roots caused her to stumble, she kept her balance, quickly venturing forty or fifty feet.

  She dropped the fuel-sodden socks in dry leaves and retreated ten feet and, with her right hand, touched the butane flame to yet more leaves downslope from the crude incendiary device. When this new fuel kindled, before the light could swell bright enough to reveal her, she hurried to the Rover and crouched there once more.

  She watched this second fire quicken low and at first fitfully until it found the drizzle of gasoline that she had left when making her way up the hill, whereupon it flared into a bright zipper and sizzled directly to the source. Flames leaped high, like a demonic manifestation, and fell back, but then surged again, bits of burning leave
s spiraling up on rising thermals, carried into darkness where they quivered like a swarm of fireflies.

  She looked west and saw that the first fire was spreading toward the north rim but also downhill toward the floor of the glen, not yet climbing into the trees, though some limbs were festooned with smoke like beards of Spanish moss.

  He was patient, certain that if he hunkered down and waited, she would make a mistake and reveal herself. His patience had given her time to upend the situation, rattle his expectations.

  He was a very big man, and big men in his line of work tended to be overconfident, to have an unconscious belief that they were all but invincible. Some also had a tendency to conflate strength with wit, attributing to themselves greater intelligence and cunning than they possessed.

  If he was one such, he would be frustrated by his failure to rise in the ranks to a position he thought commensurate with his value to the cause. She had seen such men in the FBI and elsewhere.

  This frustration would explain why, once he found her, he had come after her alone instead of waiting for backup, as any clear-thinking Arcadian would have done. She was the prize of prizes, the cure for his frustration, and he must be loath to share the credit for her capture.

  When she’d thwarted the Taser attack, especially if the hammer injured him, his confidence would have been rattled. Now, within a few minutes, she’d moved aggressively through the shadows, shooting ten rounds and setting two fires, counting on chaos to unsettle him further. When a man who rarely entertained much self-doubt began to wonder if he might be vulnerable after all, then what virtues he possessed—such as patience—frequently deserted him.

  Fire could create its own draft. The heat from this second blaze drew toward it the cool air in the glen, a breeze that hugged the ground and chased the flames toward the top of the slope. But there were countercurrents, and when flaming debris was cast high enough by the lower draft, it was spun back into this little valley, some of it descending as harmless ashes, some still burning when it fell upon combustible material.

  Maybe she’d misjudged him. Maybe the chaos she’d sown would grow out of control and consume her with him. Maybe playing with fire, as she had been doing for many weeks, figuratively and now literally, had drawn the devil to her or she to him, and this was now the fire of her final judgment.

  She wriggled under the Range Rover.

  30

  AT THE LONGRIN HOUSE, JANIS Dern’s insistent knocking and loud proclamation of her status as FBI bring to the door a freckle-faced girl of about twelve, a tomboy type in sneakers and worn blue jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words SEMPER FI.

  The kid says, “Good gracious, lady, we’re not deaf.”

  “Who’re you?” Janis demands.

  “Laurie Longrin. If you’d like to have a seat on the porch, I can bring you some iced tea or lemonade, whichever you prefer.”

  “Where’s your mother, your father?”

  “Dad’s over in his office at Stable Three. Mom is out in the potato patch, plantin’ seeds.”

  “Where would that be?”

  The girl gestures more or less northwest, then steps across the threshold, pulls the door shut, and squeezes past Janis. “Come on, I’ll show you the way.”

  Janis is the youngest of four sisters. As a consequence of that experience, she has determined never to have children, and in fact never to trust a child.

  She says, “Hey, hey, wait a second,” halting Laurie at the porch steps. “This isn’t a farm. It’s a horse-breeding operation.”

  “We’re versatile,” Laurie says. “We make horses and potatoes. Carrots, too, onions and radishes. And we sew really nice quilts.”

  “I know your type,” Janis says. “You’re a conniving little shit, aren’t you?”

  Before the girl can respond, Janis turns to the door, opens it, shouts, “FBI, FBI,” and enters the house.

  The noxious child forces her way past Janis, into the foyer, sees Chris Roberts following the hall forward from the kitchen, and sprints up the stairs. “Here they come, Mom, and they aren’t the freakin’ FBI!”

  Janis races after the kid, reaches the top of the stairs in time to see her disappear into a room near the end of the hall. A door slams. By the time Janis gets there, the door is locked.

  If she were an FBI agent in reality and not just on paper, this situation would present Janis Dern with a problem regarding illegal searches and seizures. However, because she’s in no danger of having to answer to anyone at the Bureau or Homeland, only to her Techno Arcadian superiors, who expect results by any means necessary, she draws her pistol and kicks the door hard and kicks it again.

  There is no deadbolt, only a simple privacy latch, which comes apart on the second kick, and the door rackets open.

  Pistol in both hands, though expecting no serious resistance let alone a firefight, Janis enters the room low and so fast that the rebounding door misses her.

  A home office. Laurie to the left, looking too damn pleased with herself. Devious little bitch. Her mother, Alexis, sitting at the desk, working so intently on a computer that she doesn’t even look up when the door crashes open.

  “What’re you doing?” Janis demands of the mother. “Get away from the computer.”

  Chris Roberts crosses the room in a few long strides, seizes the wheeled office chair, and shoves the woman away from the desk.

  “Too late!” cries the infuriating brat.

  * * *

  In Chase Longrin’s office in Stable 3, a sudden tumult issues from the speaker in the twelve-line phone on the desk, followed by Janis Dern’s voice: “What’re you doing? Get away from the computer.”

  Egon Gottfrey hadn’t previously noticed the red indicator light glowing above the word INTERCOM. As they had arrived in the stable and announced themselves, before they even found this office, Longrin must have opened a line between here and somewhere in the house.

  A young girl’s voice comes over the intercom: “Too late!”

  Gottfrey looks up at Chase Longrin, who is smiling.

  * * *

  Studying the computer screen, Chris Roberts says, “I think she just deleted the security-system video archives.”

  Ancel and Clare Hawk came here in the night, on horseback, and they left in one vehicle or another, which would have been captured by the security cameras.

  Janis looms over the smug child, glaring down at her, wanting to grab a fistful of her hair and pull hard and knock her down. “I know your type, oh, I know your type, you smartass little puke.”

  Undaunted, the girl says, “What kind of numbnuts would believe potatoes grow from seeds?”

  Raising the pistol as if to slash the barrel across Laurie’s face, Janis doesn’t intend to strike the girl, only to scare the exasperating self-satisfied look off that freckled countenance. It’s a patented Francine look. Exactly like Janis’s sister Francine.

  The mother pulls a gun from under her chair and fires a round into the ceiling, bringing down a rain of plaster chips.

  Janis pivots toward the mother, and here they are, each with a pistol in a two-hand grip, each a trigger pull away from blood and maybe death.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Nobody wants this,” says Chris, having been careful not to draw his weapon.

  “Maybe I want this,” Janis disagrees.

  “This isn’t like you,” Chris says. “What’s got you so pissed?”

  “Little Miss Semper Fi, this ugly freckled gash, thinks the rules don’t apply to her.”

  “I’m not ugly,” the girl declares. “I know that for a fact.”

  “It’s you,” the mother accuses Janis, “who thinks the rules don’t apply to her. You and these other bastards. Get out of my house.”

  “It’s our house,” Janis says, “until we give it back to you.”

  Chris Roberts needs two te
nse minutes to negotiate an end to the standoff in Alexis Longrin’s home office.

  31

  NEAR THE TOP OF THE north slope, Ivan Petro stands in shadow, watching firelight colonize the darkness, the thin smoke growing thicker. The acrid scent burns in his nostrils.

  He now knows the meaning of disquiet as never before. He has long taken pride in being above all fear, being the bearer of fear who brings it to others. Being a learned man, even although self-taught, he can define disquiet: the mildest state of fear, a general uneasiness threaded with doubt. Knowing the definition and being gripped by disquiet are, however, different things, for in fact those threads of doubt are more like wires vibrating in his veins.

  There are some in the revolution who embrace a disturbing explanation for why Jane Hawk is so elusive and so successful at bringing down everyone she targets. They think it’s not just her Bureau training and her natural talents that make her a singular threat. They say she is also empowered by insanity, a special kind of mad rage because of her husband’s murder and the threat to her child. Some serial killers carve their way through a long list of victims, active for years before being apprehended, because their madness is strangely coupled with reason rather than being divorced from it, and they have as well a heightened sense of intuition, so that they not only think outside the box, but also outside the box that the first box came in.

  Ivan has thought this Insane Jane explanation is fanciful at best, but in truth ridiculous. He has secretly scorned those who find the idea compelling.

  He’s no longer sure what to think of her, though at the moment no theory exists that he would scorn.