by Dean Koontz
JANIS DERN IS KEEPING HER rage in check. No need for an anger management class. No need to take a time-out in the corner without speaking privileges. No need to be sent off to bed without dessert while Francine and her two sibling cohorts get extra-large portions of cake—thanks to Daddy’s blindness to the meanness with which his precious favorite, Francine, and her two sibling toadies treat their youngest sibling. No need for anything now except a little tough love directed at one freckle-faced smart-mouthed tomboy, a little necessary discipline…
The six additional agents have arrived from Austin. They’re at Stable 2, giving the detained Longrin employees a few lessons in respect for authority before sending them home.
They have brought a Medexpress carrier containing four control mechanisms. One for Chase Longrin, one for Alexis, and two more just in case. Once the Longrins have been injected, once nanowebs have spun securely across the surfaces and into the crevices of their brains, they’ll give up Ancel and Clare’s whereabouts.
Let the others worry about Ancel and Clare. Janis has a project of her own.
Although the house and stables have been searched, Laurie Longrin hasn’t yet been found. The consensus is that the girl went overland, intending to intersect the state highway and flag down a motorist. The others, who seem swept up in magical thinking, believe she’ll either conveniently step on a rattlesnake or be chased down by coyotes before she can get to help.
Janis pities the rattlesnakes and coyotes that try to take a bite of that poisonous little bitch.
Pedro Lobo has come over from Stable 2 and is in the kitchen, guarding Alexis, while Chris Roberts is cruising the state highway, looking for the girl, hoping she’ll mistake him for a civilian and seek his aid.
Janis doesn’t buy into the consensus.
The brat isn’t just smart-mouthed; she’s also smart. She would never go blundering into the dark, wild fields without a light, with no better plan than hoping to flag down a motorist on a lonely road long past midnight. Her very nature is to be sand in the gears, a clog in the pipe, a monkey wrench in the machinery. She’s likely to hang around the property, as quiet and quick as a rat in shadows, looking for the best way to disrupt things.
The phone-intercom units in the stables have been unplugged and locked away. If the girl fled the house, not just her room, when she went through the window onto the veranda roof, she’s probably hoping to sneak back inside just long enough to use a phone.
The doors are locked. The windows are now secured on both the first and second floors.
However, she might know where a spare key is hidden or might have a key of her own.
Or…
Or she might have left the house by one window and at once returned to it by another, aware of some hidey-hole where she could wait out a search undiscovered.
No one but Janis takes this theory seriously. Laurie is a child, they say. They argue that a frightened child would not flee a place of terror only to return to it a moment later.
But the child might do that very thing if she’s something of a terror herself, has never been punished for her bad behavior, has never learned there are negative consequences, because her scheming and trickery are rewarded by her ignorant, deluded father.
Earlier, Paloma Sutherland, who is guarding Laurie’s younger sisters, had searched the upstairs, while Sally Jones and Chris and Janis had hunted for the girl downstairs, around the house, in the garage, and in the stables.
Now Janis explores the ground floor and the second floor as though she’s looking for a child half Laurie’s size, as if the girl must be a contortionist who can fold herself into the most unlikely spaces. In the very back of every closet. Behind the solid doors in the bottom third of a china cabinet that features glass doors above. Under furniture with even as little as a four-inch clearance. Behind the fire screen, in the inner hearth of a fireplace. Wherever there is paneling on an inner wall, she seeks hidden latch releases that might reveal a safe or other secret space.
In the master bedroom, her attention is drawn to an incongruous object lying on the white quartz top of a mahogany pedestal dresser. Arranged just so are an antique silver tray that holds three Lalique perfume bottles with figured crystal stoppers, an antique silver brush-and-comb set, and three small porcelain figurines of Japanese women in intricately colored kimonos. Lying askew to everything else is a pair of cheap scissors with orange plastic handles.
The girl must have cut the zip-ties with scissors taken from her desk drawer. But no scissors remain in her room. Maybe she took them for self-defense.
Evidently, Paloma Sutherland never noticed the discordant scissors among all the pretties on the dresser.
Janis stares into the mother’s dresser mirror as though she possesses the clairvoyant power to see her quarry’s reflection when the room was dark and the girl paused here and, for some reason, put down the scissors.
The en suite bathroom offers no hiding place.
When Janis opens the door to the walk-in closet and turns on the light, Laurie isn’t crouched in any corner of that space.
From the ceiling dangles a pull cord attached to one end of a trapdoor.
Paloma is the most adamant of those who believe that the girl would not have returned to the house a moment after having fled it. When she searched here, she would not have thought the attic was worth exploring. An only child, Paloma has no understanding whatsoever of the capacity for boldness and deceit of the oldest sister in a family of sisters.
The heavy springs of the ceiling trapdoor briefly groan, but the ladder unfolds to the closet floor with hardly a sound.
10
ALTHOUGH CARTER JERGEN IS GROWING accustomed to grotesque sights, he is taken aback when two large, hairy spiders—he assumes they are tarantulas—shudder out of the dark and into a swath of bare earth illuminated by the headlamps of the VelociRaptor, where it is parked alongside the airstrip.
At first it appears that the hideous arachnids are proceeding in tandem, the second close behind the first, but that’s because, in the harsh angled light, it is initially difficult to differentiate between their busy limbs and the elongated twitching shadows of their limbs. In fact, the second spider seems to be climbing onto the first, as if to ride it to whatever work spiders undertake at night. The first tarantula appears displeased and impatient with this impertinence, trying to shrug off the lazy, unwanted passenger. Their legs, each the size of one of Jergen’s fingers, jitter and clash, so that they stagger this way and that, proceeding in such a herky-jerky fashion that they make no progress at all, but instead circle back into the darkness out of which they emerged.
On any other night, the Anza Air Park would be closed. It allows only daylight takeoffs and landings. Monday morning, however, the National Security Agency negotiated a rich five-day contract ostensibly to do emergency testing of an unspecified type of airborne day-and-night communications equipment in desert conditions, without interfering with the facility’s usual business.
In fact, they will mount continuous visual surveillance of the valley while fishing from the air, within a fifty-mile radius, all conversations conducted on carrier waves assigned to disposable phones. Using an analytic scanning program customized to key words that Jane Hawk might use when speaking to her son or to whoever was currently watching over the boy, a computer aboard the aircraft can “read” conversations almost as fast as they are intercepted. When a suspect conversation is identified, that transmission can be tracked to its source and the location of the phone quickly pinpointed.
The NSA maintains such aircraft in major cities thought to be likely targets of terrorism. One has been flown here from San Diego, another from Los Angeles, and they stand now on a taxiway.
The airplanes are de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otters with two turboprop engines. The longest runway at this desert airstrip is 2,600 feet, but the Twin Otter needs only 1,200 to
take off, even less to land. In a standard configuration, in addition to a crew of two, the craft carries nineteen passengers. Customized for this unique form of surveillance, the passenger compartment provides for only four technicians and their equipment.
A tanker truck stands on a hastily poured pad of quick-cure concrete adjacent to the taxiway where the aircraft wait. It contains sufficient aviation fuel to keep the Twin Otters—which will work in four-hour shifts—in the air around the clock for three days.
Four aircraft mechanics, complete with their equipment, have been brought to the site in a sixty-foot motor home parked adjacent to the Anza Air Park terminal. It is their home for the duration, and it also houses the tanker-truck driver and a pump technician.
In addition, there is an Airbus H120 helicopter with pilot and copilot to provide aerial search and surveillance as needed.
Men are currently placing portable marker lights along both sides of the runway, one every ten feet. The markers are battery powered and can be turned on remotely when one of the de Havillands is coming in for a night landing, then switched off when the plane is safely down.
The proprietors of the air park must be pleased with the value of the contract they received, but they must also be dazzled—or at least surprised—by the size of this operation. Maybe they wonder why such “testing” couldn’t have been conducted on one of the many military bases situated in desert terrain.
Wise men and women, however, know what questions should not be asked. And these days, the words You don’t want to know are an ever more common American catchphrase.
Radley Dubose, who has been talking to the runway lighting crew, returns now to the VelociRaptor.
“They’ll be done in three hours. We’ll have an Otter in the air by seven in the morning.”
As though this desert possesses consciousness, knows how Jergen detests it, and therefore resolves to enflame his disgust at every opportunity, it now sends the two tarantulas skittering out of the shadows once more, but this time locked in more furious combat. The ridden spider stilts erratically on its hairy legs, rushing forward, then circling in place, twitching, furious, frenzied. The bedeviled creature flings itself onto its back, whereupon it and the rider flail their ghastly legs at each other, their repulsive bodies paled by dust as fine as talcum powder. They erupt apart and onto their feet, face-to-face, and strain to their full height, en pointe and legs quivering with tension, so that it seems one or the other will now deliver a lethal bite. Then they relax and, side by side, scurry away into the darkness once more.
“What the hell was that all about?” Jergen wonders.
“Romance,” says Dubose. “My friend, if you can’t recognize passion when you see it, too damn much time has passed since you were last in the saddle.”
11
LIKE SOME COLD HAUNT THAT has crossed over from the world of the dead, Janis Dern drifts through pools of shadow and amber light, under a series of conical lamps attached to the central roof beam, raising not one squeak from the plywood underfoot.
Stacked six to seven feet high, boxes wall the main north-south aisle, except where shadowed passageways intersect from the west and east. In air scented with dust and aging cardboard, the shredded webs of dead spiders hang from the rafters and quiver in a draft, like the gray and tattered flags of forgotten nations, and scattered on the floor are bright flecks of Christmas-ornament glitter sparkling red, green, gold, and silver.
Janis keeps her right hand on the pistol in her belt holster. If the tomboy initially took the scissors with her to use them for self-defense, perhaps she’d left them on the dresser because she had since acquired a better weapon. She might have taken a handgun from one of the nightstands flanking her parents’ bed. She is not yet thirteen, a child who should fear firearms and who should certainly have had no training in their use. However, these days there are a great many irresponsible parents, and it is possible that the snarky little bitch knows how to stand, hold, and aim to compensate for recoil.
At first Janis approaches every intersection with exaggerated caution—until she recognizes that ahead of her an open set of steel stairs spirals up to some higher redoubt. She knows at once that the girl has gone there, that this is why the brat didn’t flee the house for the cover of the night outside. The upper room, whatever it might be, provides something that the brat wants, some advantage, some weapon, some…
“Oh, shit,” she says, “a phone.”
No longer concerned that the tomboy is armed and lying in wait among the stacks of boxes, Janis hurries to the stairs and ascends the tight spirals like a bullet speeding through a rifled barrel.
At the top is a small room of windowed walls offering a 360-degree view of the night, a phone on a shelf between two windows, but no girl.
Suddenly a great turbulence of sound and wind arises, the many panes thrumming and, where loosely fit, rattling in their frames. Dust and chaff and dead leaves and shingle splinters are swept off the surrounding roof of the house to flail the windows as though some pestilential swarm has come out of the deep prairie night. A fierce bright shaft stabs down and sweeps across the glass, flooding the high redoubt with light and with the shadows of mullions and muntins that distort and twist their way around the room as they are harried by the passage of the beam….
Janis stands astonished, pierced by a sense of the uncanny, but this disturbance of the mind and heart lasts only a moment before she realizes that a helicopter has come down fast out of the night. Following her realization, the craft appears behind the searchlight, clearing the roof by no more than twenty feet, to hover above the Escalade that blocks the entry lane. Spotlighted, Sally Jones looks up and waves at the helo, as though she assumes it represents some additional support about which she hasn’t been told.
The little bitch tomboy, the deceitful smart-ass sure-to-be-one-day-whore, used the phone here, called in someone. Not the county sheriff. There’s no law-enforcement designation on the helo. Whoever these bastards are, they believe what bullshit the snot-eating geek told them, so they come roaring in like a brigade of Texas Rangers. This is shaping up to be another version of the fiasco at the Hawks’ ranch on Sunday night, when that sonofabitch Juan Saba, the ranch manager, stood them off.
Abruptly Janis remembers that she told Laurie Longrin about the brain implants in some detail. The injections. The nanoconstructs. How they penetrate the blood-brain barrier. How they assemble into a web across and into the tissue of the brain.
All that is something Jane Hawk clearly knows, but it’s not something that anyone in the conspiracy is authorized to reveal to others. Janis wanted to terrorize the freckle-faced potato-sucking piglet, and she figured to get hold of a control mechanism later and inject the little rat—or, failing that, to lobby Egon Gottfrey to have the injected parents eventually kill the children and then themselves—so that what she revealed to Laurie wouldn’t matter.
Now it matters.
She needs to find the girl. Quick.
12
THE DARK TEXAS PLAIN INFINITE in appearance. The sky overhead infinite in fact. Chris Roberts in his radically hot, bespoke Range Rover by Overfinch North America. On top of the world, an insider in the most powerful cabal of insiders in all history, Techno Arcadian fighter for Utopia, one of the rulers of the ruled, destined to live forever—Infinite! Eternal!—if medical technology progresses as it has done in recent years. Puff Daddy on the CD deck. So hard-ass cool! Chris singing along with Puff Daddy like he did when he was thirteen, so long ago. Puff Daddy and Faith Evans. So hot, pure sex! Thinking about shacking up with Janis Dern for a torrid week…
He is cruising back and forth on the two-lane state highway, all that lonely blacktop to himself at this late hour. He hopes the Longrin kid will appear on the shoulder of the road, but thus far she remains missing.
His attention is drawn to the running lights of a helicopter approaching from o
ut of the northwest. In even small cities these days, policing is done by air as well as on the streets, and the sight of an airborne patrol spotlighting a fleeing fugitive’s car as it races recklessly along a freeway is common stuff on the evening news. In the hinterlands like this, however, the skies are usually quiet at night. Chris intuits trouble in this aerial apparition.
The chopper crosses the highway ahead of him, on a trajectory that will take it directly to Longrin Stables. At an altitude of maybe three hundred feet, in the dark, any identification that might be on the aircraft can’t be seen.
When he returns his attention to the road, oncoming headlamps have materialized. They quickly grow larger, brighter, issuing from the direction of Worstead. In a moment, he can see it’s not just one vehicle but a caravan. They flash past him like a pack of NASCAR competitors in a tight formation toward the finish line: two, three, five, seven, nine, ten, eleven vehicles, mostly pickups and SUVs, a couple cars.
The timing of the helicopter and the cars isn’t coincidental. And there aren’t that many places they could be going in this empty country. At this hour, at their speed, the only place they can be headed is Longrin Stables.
No more oncoming headlamps appear.
Chris brakes, hangs a hard U-turn, and switches off the music. By the time he reaches the Longrin property, the eleven cars are parked along the private entrance lane, this side of the blocking Escalade, where Sally Jones and a few new agents from Austin engage in a confrontation with a crowd of local men and women. Chris parks athwart the lane to prevent an easy exit by this self-appointed posse. He gets out of the Range Rover and moves toward the crowd, his right hand on the pistol in his belt holster.
13
IN THE ATTIC, AT THE end of one of the rows of stored goods, Laurie Longrin knelt with her back pressed against the stacked boxes, out of sight of the main aisle.