by Dean Koontz
According to the laws of physics established by the Unknown Playwright, when the urge to pistol-whip some idiot overcomes you, that is also not possible via Skype.
“I’m just stating for the record,” says Bricker, “you told me I’m not a suspect and I don’t need to lawyer up. So whatever I say here, it can’t be used against me in a court of law”—he raises one hand in a pledge—“so help me, God.”
Lonnie John Bricker has opened his own law practice.
“All right then,” says Gottfrey. “I sent Mr. Titus two photos, and he printed them out for you.”
Bricker glances at the photographs lying on the desk beside him, and then he squints at the screen again. “What about them?”
“Do you remember that man and woman being passengers on the bus you drove from Killeen to Houston earlier today?”
“Why wouldn’t I remember them? Or at least her. She’s maybe almost sixty, but she’s still a looker, and she sure had an eye for me. A lot of the ladies think us bus drivers are romantic figures, always off to some far place.”
“What do you mean, she had an eye for you?” According to what Gottfrey knows about Clare Hawk, this doesn’t sound like her. “How could you tell she had an eye for you?”
Leaning back in his chair, Bricker smiles smugly and shakes his head. “No offense intended, but if by your age you haven’t learned to see the love light shining in some beauty’s eyes, you probably can’t never be taught how.”
When Vince Penn snickers at this statement, Gottfrey restrains himself from putting the bus driver in his place with a sharp rebuke and from shooting Vince dead, thereby removing him from the script.
“Mr. Bricker, can you tell me where they got off the bus?”
“It was a full-booked run, door-to-door, no in-betweeners. They got off in Houston.”
“You remember seeing them get off?”
Bricker broods for a moment. “They could’ve got off while I was at the exterior luggage compartments, getting people’s bags.”
“Did this man and woman have luggage?”
“I think…maybe just carry-on…maybe none.”
“Well, the problem is, we’ve reviewed the security video in Houston. They never disembarked there.”
The look of bewilderment underlying Bricker’s other expressions takes command of his rubbery face. “I don’t know what that means.”
“When all the passengers have received their luggage, do you return to the bus to be sure everyone has gotten off?”
“I generally walk the aisle, take a look around. Wasn’t anyone there.”
“Is there a lavatory on board the bus?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you always check the lavatory at the end of a trip?”
“Sometimes.”
“Why not always, routinely?”
Getting defensive, Bricker says, “I don’t clean toilets. Only reason to check the lav is if there’s a couple passengers you think might have a habit, one of them might go in there to shoot up, so you find a junkie dead of an overdose.”
“Has that ever happened to you?”
“No. But I heard of it.”
“So you didn’t check the lavatory this time?”
“There wasn’t any obvious freak aboard. They were a straight-arrow bunch, nice and quiet from Killeen to Houston.”
“What happens to the bus after you’ve off-loaded the luggage and all the passengers are gone?”
“I drove a different bus to San Antone. The one from Killeen, it was cleaned, fueled, serviced as needed, got ready for its next leg. I don’t know maintenance routine. You’ll have to ask somebody else about maintenance routine. Can I go now or am I in trouble?”
“Why would you be in trouble, Mr. Bricker?”
“No good reason. But the law does get it wrong sometimes.”
After a silence, Gottfrey says, “You aren’t in trouble. But I would be remiss if I didn’t make sure you understood that lying to an agent of the FBI is a crime.”
After a silence of his own, Bricker says, “I didn’t lie. What would I have to lie about? I just drove from Killeen to Houston.”
“I’m happy for you, Mr. Bricker. I’m happy you didn’t lie. When people do lie, we always find out sooner or later.”
51
THE FRECKLE-FACED LITTLE BITCH KEEPS smirking at Janis Dern. She’s been told to keep her smart mouth shut or it’ll be taped shut, so she doesn’t speak. But the kid can mock and insult with a look as well as with a word.
If Francine, the eldest of the four Dern sisters, wasn’t still alive, Janis would need to consider that this tomboy bitch is the very reincarnation of the other.
To discourage rebellion against this illegal detention, the ten employees have been locked in Stable 2. The exits from the long building are being guarded by Pedro and Alejandro Lobo.
Some of the detainees have spouses or others who expect them to return home at a certain time. They have made carefully monitored phone calls to explain that they will be working late. Very late.
The family poses a different problem. They draw strength and confidence from one another. As a unit, they’re dangerous. To better manage them and to prevent them from conspiring to do something reckless, they have been separated.
Here at the house, Alexis Longrin is shackled to a chair at the kitchen table, watched over by Chris Roberts. Chase Longrin has been locked in a windowless half bath off the downstairs hall, sitting on the toilet, cuffed ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist, with a trammeling line that links the cuffs and prevents him from standing.
Paloma Sutherland, who has left Sally Jones alone to block the driveway with the Cadillac Escalade, is with the two younger girls—eight-year-old Daphne and six-year-old Artemis—in the bedroom that they share. Paloma has a way with younger children. They might even like being imprisoned by her. Anyway, Daphne and Artemis are too young to have been fully corrupted by twelve-year-old Laurie, though Daphne earlier exhibited moments of spirited resistance.
Janis has assigned herself to the oldest of the Longrin girls.
Posters decorate Laurie’s room. Horses standing proud. Horses galloping. Airborne skateboarders performing ollies and flips. A solemn Marine in the Corps’ most formal dress mess uniform, right arm across his chest, hand on the hilt of his Mameluke sword.
Laurie’s ankles are zip-tied to the front stretcher bar of her desk chair, preventing her from getting to her feet. Her left hand is likewise bound to an arm of the chair.
Janis leaves the girl’s right hand free, as an insult. “You need one hand to pick your nose. You look like a girl who picks her nose a lot. Do you eat your boogers? You sure look like a geek girl who eats her boogers. You want to give me the screw-you finger, don’t you? That’s the kind of crude, rude girl you are, so I left your hand free for that, too. But you know what? If you give me the finger, I’ll use the butt of my pistol on it, like a hammer, break all three knuckles. You’re done giving me shit. I won’t take any more.”
Laurie neither sulks nor cringes timidly. She sits in stoic indifference, though she is alert to everything Janis does.
A bookcase contains perhaps a hundred volumes, paperbacks and hardcovers, all young-adult novels. Janis has never read any of the books, has never heard of any of the authors. But she spends a few minutes examining the collection, making little sounds of derisive amusement or sighing or shaking her head, conveying contempt for the girl’s puerile taste in literature.
She searches the dresser drawers as well, disarranging the contents. She withdraws some garments for a closer look and then drops them on the floor, treading carelessly on them when she suspects the items are ones the girl particularly likes.
Finally she picks up a side chair and carries it to the desk and sits, facing Laurie. Janis says nothing, but only stares at her prisone
r’s profile.
After a while, Laurie glances at her, expressionless, and then turns her head forward once more to contemplate the desk.
“What’s all this shit on the walls?” Janis asks.
Laurie says nothing.
“It’s okay, you can talk. I won’t tape your mouth shut. What kind of girl’s room is this, anyway?”
“It’s stuff I like.”
“I don’t see any girl things.”
“Horses are girl things. Lots of girls love horses.”
“Okay, but what I don’t see is any girly things.”
Laurie says nothing.
“When will you turn thirteen?”
“Next month. What’s it to you?”
“Do you skateboard?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s with the semper fi T-shirt and the poster? You want to be a Marine someday?”
“I could be if I wanted.”
From a distance of maybe two feet, Janis stares at the girl’s profile in silence. Finally she says, “So are you a lesbo?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Other girls, real girls, they’d have posters of boy bands.”
“Boy bands and actors—that’s not who’s cool,” Laurie says.
“So who do you think is cool? Girl bands, actresses with long smooth legs and wet mouths you could kiss?”
Laurie faces Janis again and glares at her. “You’re disgusting. Crude and stupid.”
Janis smiles knowingly. “So who do you think is cool?”
“People who do what’s right but tough to do, what takes guts, what takes a spine.”
“Well, you know, it takes a spine for a lesbo to out herself,” Janis taunts.
“Maybe you didn’t notice, but the Marine in the poster is a guy. He’s a hunk. All by himself, he could wade through an army of boy-band types and knock them all flat.”
They’re eye to eye now, and face-offs are something Janis does well. She has an intimidating stare that disturbs people; they meet it, and they’re afraid, but they’re often even more afraid to look away. One of the men she’s taken up with and later dropped told her that she has ax-murderer eyes. Another said that during sex her yellow-brown eyes were as wild as those of some jungle animal, some fierce predator, which turned him on, except eventually he realized that her stare was predatory when sex wasn’t on the agenda, even in moments that he thought were tender. She receives such insults as compliments. She uses her stare as though it is a stiletto, piercing people with it, some of them being people into whom she would enjoy sliding a real blade.
When the girl doesn’t soon look away, Janis leans closer, until their faces are a foot apart, and she lowers her voice almost to a whisper. “Did Jane Hawk tell you about the brain implants? Or maybe she told your daddy and you overheard it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, even if your daddy knows, he wouldn’t have scared you by sharing it. But I will.”
Maintaining eye contact, Janis touches a forefinger to the crook of the girl’s left arm.
Laurie twitches but says nothing and doesn’t look away.
“That’s where they find a vein and inject you. With three big ampules holding maybe millions of tiny machines suspended in liquid, each just a few molecules. Nanoconstructs. They swim through your blood, into your head, assemble themselves into a web, a control mechanism powered by the electrical current in your brain. Then you’re told to forget it happened, and you forget. For the rest of your life, we own you, but you don’t know it. For the rest of your life, you do exactly what you’re told, and you’re happy to do it. If we say kill your sisters, you will. If we tell you to kill yourself, you will. No more snark from Laurie Longrin. No more smirking, no cheeky backtalk, no attitude. Just obedient little Laurie, so eager to please, eager to kiss my ass if I want it kissed.”
Janis reads desperation in her captive’s eyes and knows that she isn’t misreading this.
The girl can’t keep a faint tremor out of her voice. “If you had such a thing, you’d already be injecting me.”
“I would, yes. Oh, I’d love it. I’d keep you for a pet. But my boss decides who and when—or maybe someone above him decides. My boss says the script requires us to be discreet, to be selective in who we choose to enslave with injections. The script doesn’t call for us to do millions of you overnight.”
Frowning, the girl says, “What script?”
“It’s just the way he talks. But you listen to me, Little Miss Attitude. If I get my hands on those ampules, whether it’s a week from now or a year, I’ll come back for you and inject you. I don’t care what the script says, what my boss says. You’ll spend the rest of your miserable life looking over your shoulder, but you won’t see me coming. Then you’ll be my bootlicker, Little Miss Lickspittle.”
Intimidated, the girl breaks eye contact. But then gathers her courage and says, “Heck, you’re just a walking, talking pile of horseshit, that’s all you are.” She meets her captor’s eyes again and smiles. “What kind of numbnuts thinks potatoes grow from seeds?”
Janis sometimes has a problem with temper. It’s not as though she needs counseling or therapy. Screw that. She’s not a chronic sorehead. She certainly doesn’t have a psychological condition. She is just a hard-charging achiever who sees how the world works and who knows how it should work and who gets damn impatient when she encounters people like this freckled smart-mouth brat who is all attitude, who’ll never be anything but sand in the gears.
There is no danger that Janis will beat Laurie Longrin to death the way Egon beat that drunken cowboy to death.
How beautiful Egon was in his cold, efficient rage, a maître de ballet bringing the grace of dance to brutal violence.
Janis isn’t going to pull her pistol, isn’t going to shoot this kid in her smug, smirky face. There’s no danger of that whatsoever.
Her response to the mockery about the potato seeds is measured, exactly the degree of corporal punishment required to teach this insolent child some manners. She raises her arm and slaps Laurie’s face hard—there has to be some pain, after all, if a lesson is to be learned—and then backhands her with equal vigor.
The girl gasps in shock but doesn’t cry out.
Janis gets up and goes into the adjacent bathroom. For a while, she runs cold water over her stinging hand.
When she returns to the bedroom, the girl sits stone-faced. She doesn’t in any way acknowledge her captor’s presence. A thread of blood sews its way from the right corner of her mouth, down her chin, along her slender throat.
Janis doesn’t return to the chair that earlier she put near the girl, but she doesn’t take the chair back to the place from which she moved it, either. Let the little bitch dread the resumption of their chat. Let her wonder when the conversation will begin again, where it might lead, what consequences it might have.
Instead, Janis goes to the bookcases. She tears the print blocks out of the boards of the hardcovers and rips apart the paperbacks. It is most likely from books that this wayward child acquired her attitude. That was certainly the case with Francine, Janis’s childhood tormentor, who would have treated Cinderella far worse than Cindy’s hateful stepsisters had treated her.
52
THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY has recently opened an office in a wing of the Killeen–Fort Hood Regional Airport.
Egon Gottfrey and his men possess Homeland Security ID as genuine as their FBI credentials. Before they leave the Killeen Police Department for the airport, Gottfrey calls the deputy director of Homeland and requests that he instruct the on-duty personnel at the airport office to welcome him and his men as VIPs.
The deputy director is an Arcadian.
This is another advantage of conducting a secret revolution from inside the existing government ra
ther than mounting an armed rebellion from outside. The authorities you will one day exterminate or convert with nanomachine implants are pleased to assist you; there is no resistance. And they have ready for your use just about any expensive piece of equipment you might require.
When Gottfrey arrives, carrying the Medexpress cooler with the control mechanisms meant for Ancel and Clare, this Killeen outpost of Homeland has readied a twin-engine helicopter. Fully equipped for night flight. Nine-passenger capacity. The pilot is on-site to take them to Houston, where they will put down in the vicinity of the bus terminal before 10:00 P.M.
The Rhino GX and the Jeep Wrangler will be driven by Homeland agents stationed in Killeen, though they won’t reach Houston until midnight. They will deliver the vehicles to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, downtown, where Gottfrey, Baldwin, and Penn will spend the night.
The Rhino and the Jeep appear on the vehicle-inventory lists of Homeland, the FBI, and the NSA. But none of those organizations shares such data; so no question will be raised as to why Egon and his men, ostensibly Homeland agents, are driving FBI vehicles.
And so it is: A helo that can’t be proven to exist lifts off from Killeen, a city that can’t be proven to exist, carrying three men whose bodies are only concepts and whose minds, except in Gottfrey’s case, might also be nothing more than concepts, ferrying them to Houston, another city that can’t be proven to exist, through a night sky that had earlier seemed as solid as stone but that, of course, is no more verifiably real than anything else.
Because Gottfrey and his associates haven’t had dinner and won’t have time to eat in Houston, a selection of sandwiches from Subway is provided aboard the helo.
Although the sandwiches are no more real than anything else, they are tasty, aromatic, filling, vividly detailed in their appeal to all five senses. So real. This isn’t the first time something as ordinary as food has briefly shaken Egon’s belief system.
Sometimes when he is weary and tense and frustrated, radical philosophical nihilism is a most difficult faith by which to live.