The Forbidden Door

by Dean Koontz

  Because of the disturbing paintings in his office and what his uncle, Enrique, had called his “obsession with blood,” she thought the moment would be creepy when she gave him her hand, but it was instead surprisingly tender. He stood there for a few minutes, his grip gentle, though hers was fierce. And her tears passed.

  When she let go of him, he walked away into the dark.

  She put up the window and shifted the car into gear and drove out of Indio into Palm Springs. She found a motel and paid cash for a room and took a long shower as hot as she could tolerate. When she dressed, she assumed the identity of Leslie Anderson, using an ash-blond wig, lenses that turned her blue eyes gray, and a fake mole the size of a pea, which attached to her upper lip with spirit gum. Leslie wore too much makeup and Smashbox lipstick.

  Before she went out for dinner, she turned on the television and checked a cable-news network. There had been a terrorist attack in, of all places, rural Borrego Valley. It was believed that the area’s water supply had been contaminated with a powerful animal tranquilizer—related to phencyclidine, angel dust, but a hundred times more powerful—that had inspired acts of extreme violence.

  Yeah, right.

  In a corner booth in a quiet restaurant with low lighting, she ate a filet mignon with sliced fresh tomatoes, asparagus, haricot verts. She drank two glasses of good cabernet.

  She was too exhausted to sleep. She walked residential streets for two hours, under the benediction of the infinite and eternal stars. Minute by minute and step by lonely step, as surely as her lungs drew life from the air, her mind drew from the night and all its wonder, drew from it the increasing conviction that she was born for this fight and that she would not lose it. She had compiled and secreted away a lot of evidence. She knew what she needed next. She didn’t know how to get it; but she would figure that out. Bernie Riggowitz had survived Auschwitz, and in spite of all his losses, he stood now with her. Mishpokhe. He was proof that though evil could win in the short term, it could be defeated in time.

  She had no illusions. Her life hung by a thread. She was no more special than anyone else. Over the millennia, billions upon billions of people had died, been remembered briefly, been forgotten; and they were now gone as if they’d never existed. She was merely another among those billions. But just as she had no illusions, so in this matter she had no choices. She could be only who she was, could do only what she had always done, and one thing she had never done was surrender.

  This book is dedicated to Leason and Marlene Pomeroy, affectionately known as the fireball and the firecracker, who are a wondrous delight.

  Author’s Note

  In the previous Jane Hawk novel, The Crooked Staircase, and again in The Forbidden Door I have rescheduled the annual blooming of the Anza-Borrego Desert to a later date in the spring. Thousands of tourists come to Borrego Springs to see this spectacular display; they would have been a serious complication to Jane’s rescue operation, which was already difficult enough.

  Carter Jergen, a character in this novel, has an acerbic view of Borrego Springs and environs that I do not share. I would like to visit again someday without having to don a disguise.

  To keep the story moving, I have taken certain liberties with vehicle maintenance and other procedures at the bus stations in Houston and Beaumont, Texas.

  In part 5, chapter 6, Minette Butterworth, an English teacher, is reduced to a subhuman condition. During this scene, through her mind pass words that mean nothing to her, though once they had meant a great deal: first, “meaningless as wind in dry grass or rat’s feet over broken glass”; then “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” These are lines from “The Hollow Men” and “The Wasteland” by T. S. Eliot.

  Please turn the page for a preview of

  the next Jane Hawk novel

  by #1 New York Times bestselling author

  DEAN KOONTZ

  THE NIGHT WINDOW

  1

  THE TRIPLE-PANE FLOOR-TO-CEILING windows of Hollister’s study frame the rising plain to the west, the foothills, and the distant Rocky Mountains that were long ago born from the earth in cataclysm, now dark and majestic against a sullen sky. It is a view to match the man who stands at this wall of glass. The word cataclysm is a synonym for disaster or upheaval but also for revolution, and he is the leader of the greatest revolution in history. The greatest and the last. The end of history is near, after which his vision of a pacified world will endure forever.

  Meanwhile, there are mundane tasks to perform, obligations to address. For one thing, there is someone who needs to be killed.

  In about two hours, when a late-season storm descends on these high plains east of Denver, the hunt will begin, and one of two men will die at the hand of the other, a fact that Wainwright Warwick Hollister finds neither exhilarating nor frightening. Of profound importance to Hollister is that he avoid the character weaknesses of his father, Orenthal Hollister, and at all times comport himself in a more formidable and responsible manner than had his old man. Among other things, this means that when someone needs to be eliminated, the killing can’t always be done by a hireling. If a man is too finicky to get blood on his hands once in a while, or if he lacks the courage to put himself at physical risk, then he can’t claim to be a leader in this world of wolves, nor even a member of the pack, but is instead only a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

  The hunt will occur here, on Crystal Creek Ranch, Hollister’s nine-thousand-acre spread, unto itself a world of pine forests and rolling meadows. The chase will not be fair, because Hollister does not believe in fairness, which exists nowhere either in nature or in the human sphere. Fairness is an illusion of the weak and ignorant; it is the insincere promise made by those who manipulate the masses for gain.

  The quarry, however, will have a chance to survive. A very slim one, but a chance. Although Hollister’s father, Orenthal, had been a powerful man physically as well as financially, his heart had been that of a coward. If ever he had decided that he couldn’t farm out all the violence required for the furtherance of his business, if he’d seen the moral need for every prince to be also a warrior, he wouldn’t have given the quarry any chance whatsoever. The hunt would have been an empty ritual with only one possible end: the triumph of Orenthal and the death of his prey.

  Now the security system, which always knows Hollister’s location in this forty-six-thousand-square-foot residence, speaks in a soft, feminine voice. “Mr. Thomas Buckle has arrived in the library.”

  Thomas Buckle is a houseguest from Los Angeles. The sole passenger on Hollister’s Gulfstream V, he had landed at 10:00 this morning on the Crystal Creek Ranch’s six-thousand-foot airstrip, had been driven 1.6 miles from the hangar to the main house in a Rolls Royce Phantom, and had been settled in a guest suite on the main floor.

  He will most likely be dead by dawn.

  The house is a sleek, ultramodern masterpiece of native stone, glass, and stainless steel, with floors of limestone on which ornately figured antique Persian carpets float like lush warm islands on a cold pale sea.

  The library contains twenty-five thousand volumes that Hollister inherited from his father. The old man was a lifelong reader of novels. But his son has no use for fiction. Wainwright Warwick Hollister is a realist from his epidermis to his marrow. Orenthal also read many works of philosophy, forever searching for the meaning of life. His son has no use for philosophy because he already knows the two words that give life its meaning: money and power. Only money and power can defend against the chaos of this world and ensure a life of pleasure. Those people whom he can’t buy, Hollister can destroy. People are tools, unless they decline to be used, whereupon they become merely obstructions that must be broken and quickly swept aside—or eliminated entirely.

  With no need for his father’s books, he had considered donating the collection to a charity or university but instead moved them to this place as a reminde
r of the old man’s fatal weakness.

  Now, as Hollister enters the library, Thomas Buckle turns from the shelves and says, “What a magnificent collection. First editions of everything from Bradbury to Wolfe. Hammett and Hemingway. Stark and Steinbeck. Such eclectic taste.”

  Buckle is twenty-six, handsome enough to be an actor, though he dreams of a career as a famous film director. He has already made two low-budget movies acclaimed by some critics, but box-office success has eluded him. He is at a crucial juncture, an ambitious young man of considerable talent whose philosophy and vision are at odds with the common wisdom that currently prevails in Hollywood, which he has begun to discover will limit his opportunities.

  He has come here in response to a personal phone call from Wainwright Hollister, who expressed admiration for the young man’s work and a desire to discuss a business proposal involving film production. This is a lie. However, as people are tools, so lies are nothing more than the various grips that one must apply to make them perform as wanted.

  Upon the director’s arrival, Hollister had briefly greeted him, so that now there is no need for the formalities of introduction. A smile is all he requires when he says, “Perhaps you would like to select one of these novels that’s never been filmed and make it our first project together.”

  Although he is the least sentimental of men and has no capacity for the more tender emotions, Wainwright Hollister is graced with a broad, almost supernaturally pleasant face that can produce a smile with as many charming permutations as that of any courtesan in history, and he can use it to bewitch both women and men. They see compassion when in fact he regards them with icy contempt, see mercy when they should see cruelty, see humility when he views them with condescension. He is universally thought to be a most amiable man with a singular capacity for friendship, though in his heart he views everyone as a stranger too unknowable ever to be a friend. He uses his supple, glorious smile as if it is a farmer’s seeding machine, planting kernels of deceit deep in everyone he meets.

  Having been flown to Colorado in high style and having been treated like a prodigal son, Thomas Buckle takes seriously the offer to select any book in this library to translate to film. He looks around wonderingly at the shelves of material. “Oh, well, I sure wouldn’t want to make that choice lightly, sir. I’d want to have a better idea of what’s here.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to pore through the collection later,” Hollister lies. “Let’s have lunch. And please dispense with the ‘sir.’ I haven’t been knighted. Just call me Wayne. Wainwright is a mouthful, and Warwick sounds like the villain in some superhero movie.”

  Thomas Buckle is an honest young man. His father is a tailor, a salaried employee of a dry-cleaning shop, and his mother works as a department-store seamstress. Although his parents struggled to contribute to his film-school tuition, Thomas paid for most of it, having worked part-time jobs since his freshman year in high school. On his two movies, he cut his fees for writing, directing, and co-producing in order to add to the budget for better actors and more scene setups. He is too naïve to realize that his producing partner on those projects didn’t share his scruples and cleverly siphoned off some of the studio’s money, which Hollister discovered from the exhaustive investigation he commissioned of Buckle’s affairs. As the honest child of honest people, as an earnest artist and a striver in the all-American tradition, the young man has an abundance of hope and determination, but a serious deficit of street smarts; much to learn and no time left to learn it.

  As they make their way from the library to the dining room, Tom Buckle can’t restrain himself from commenting on the grandeur of the house and the high pedigree of the paintings on the walls—Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst….He is a poor boy enchanted by Hollister’s great wealth, much as the sorcerer’s apprentice might be captivated by the mystery of his master during the first day on the job.

  There is no envy in his manner, no evidence of greed. Rather, as a filmmaker, he is besotted with the visuals. The drama of the house appeals to him as a story setting, and he is spinning some private narrative in his mind. Perhaps he imagines a biographical film of his own life, with this scene as the turning point between failure and phenomenal success.

  Hollister enjoys answering questions about the architecture and the art, telling anecdotes of construction and acquisition. Only when he senses that Tom Buckle has been drawn into his host’s orbit, and then with great calculation, does Wainwright Hollister put one arm around the young director’s shoulders in the manner of a doting uncle.

  This familiarity is received without the slightest stiffening or surprise. Honest men from honest families are at a disadvantage in this world of lies. The poor fool is as good as dead already.

  2

  THE WISDOM OF MILLENNIA AND numerous cultures was stacked on a grid maze of shelves flanking dimly lighted aisles in which no one searched for knowledge, all as quiet as an undiscovered pharaoh’s tomb in a pyramid drifted over by a thousand feet of sand.

  That first Wednesday morning in April, Jane Hawk was ensconced in a library in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles, using one of the public-access workstations nestled in a computer alcove, which at the moment offered the only action in the building. Because every computer featured a GPS locater—as did every smartphone, electronic tablet, and laptop—she carried none of those things. Although the authorities searching for her knew she used library computers, on this occasion she avoided websites they might expect to be of interest to her. Consequently, she was relatively secure in the conviction that none of her probes would trigger a track-to-source security program and pinpoint her location.

  Many people using a computer or smartphone became so distracted that they ceased to be aware of what happened in the world around them and were in Condition White, one of the four Cooper Color Codes describing levels of situational awareness. After earning a college degree in forensic psychology in three years, after twelve weeks of training at Quantico, and after having served as an FBI agent for six years before going rogue, Jane was perpetually in Condition Yellow: relaxed but alert, aware, not in expectation of an attack, but never oblivious of significant events around her.

  Continuous situational awareness was necessary to avoid being cast abruptly into Condition Red, with a genuine threat imminent.

  Between yellow and red was Condition Orange, when an aware and alert person recognized something strange or wrong in a situation, a potential threat looming. In this case, through peripheral vision, she realized that a man who’d entered after her and settled at one of the other computers was spending considerably more time watching her than the screen before him.

  Maybe he was staring at her just because he liked the way she looked. She had considerable experience of men’s admiration.

  Her own hair concealed by an excellent shaggy-cut ash-blond wig, blue eyes made gray by contact lenses, a fake mole the size of a pea attached to her upper lip with spirit gum, wearing a little too much makeup and Smashbox lipstick, she was deep in her Leslie Anderson identity. Because she looked younger than she was and wore a pair of stage-prop glasses with bright red frames, she could be mistaken for a studious college girl. She never behaved in a furtive or nervous manner, as the most-wanted fugitive on the FBI list might be expected to do, but called attention to herself in subtle ways—yawning, stretching, muttering at the computer screen—and chatted up anyone who spoke to her. She was confident that no average citizen would easily see through Leslie Anderson and recognize the wanted woman whom the media called the “beautiful monster.”

  However, the guy kept staring at her. Twice when she casually glanced in his direction, he quickly looked away, pretending to be absorbed in the data on his screen.

  His genetic roots were in the subcontinent of India. Caramel skin, black hair, large dark eyes. Perhaps thirty pounds overweight. A pleasant, r
ound face. Maybe twenty-five. Dressed in khakis and a yellow pullover.

  He didn’t fit the profile of law enforcement or that of an intelligence-agency spook. Nevertheless, he made her uneasy. More than uneasy. She never dismissed the still, small voice of intuition that had so often kept her alive.

  So, Condition Orange. Two options: engage or evade. The second was nearly always the better choice, as the first was more likely to lead to Condition Red and a violent confrontation.

  Jane backed out of the website she had been exploring, clicked off the computer, picked up her tote, and walked out of the alcove.

  As she moved toward the front desk, she glanced back. The plump man was standing, holding something in his left hand, at his side, so she couldn’t identify it, and watching her intently as he spoke into his phone.

  When she opened the door at the main entrance, she saw another man standing by her metallic-gray Ford Explorer Scout in the public parking lot, talking on his phone. Tall, lean, dressed all in black, he was too distant for her to see his face. But on this mild sunny day, his knee-length raincoat might have been worn to conceal a sawed-off shotgun or maybe a Taser XREP 12-gauge that could deliver an electronic projectile and a disabling shock from a distance of a hundred feet. He looked as real as death and yet phantasmal, like an assassin who had slipped through a rent in the cosmic fabric between this world and another, on some mystical mission.

  The Explorer, a stolen vehicle, had been scrubbed of its former identity in Mexico, given a purpose-built 700-horsepower 502 Chevy engine, and purchased from a reliable black-market dealer in Nogales, Arizona, who didn’t keep records. There seemed to be no way it could have been tied to her.