by Dean Koontz
A vastness of fog above and all around, an immensity of sea to every quarter of the compass, and a watery abyss below imposed upon me a loneliness almost unbearable because of its intensity and also because of what shared the boat with me. I mean the dead men, yes, but not only the dead; I mean primarily the bombs, four cities’ worth of death condensed and packed into containers that were symbolic urns full of the ashes of all humanity.
The crates transshipped from Junie’s Moonbeam were built not of plyboard but of steel. The hinged lids were held down by four evenly spaced bolt latches.
I slid open the four bolts on the first crate. After a brief hesitation, I lifted the lid.
The halogen light reached far enough to show me two compartments with a large device in each. They appeared to be of cast and machined steel, of formidable weight, bending the light seductively, liquidly, at every curve, each mysterious detail and each fitting ominous in design. In its entirety, the thing was not merely a weapon, but the quintessence of evil.
The crate had been welded together around an armature that kept the bomb immobile. Special tools would have been needed to free it from the shipping case.
At what might have been the core of each device, a four-inch-diameter hole appeared to have been crafted to receive a mated plug.
I stared at the hole for a while before realizing that also bolted to the armature was a box separate from the bomb. This had a hinged lid held shut by a single bolt.
Inside I discovered a double-walled felt bag that filled the space. I lifted out the bag and found within it the plug to match the hole, which weighed four or five pounds.
From the look of it, I guessed that once inserted into the core, it would lock in place with a twist. One end featured an LED readout currently blank and a keypad for data input.
The trigger.
Returning the plug to the soft bag, I put it on the deck. I collected the other three.
After closing the two crates, I carried all four detonators, in their sacks, up the open stairs to the foredeck, which consisted of a narrow walkway around a central structure. I went through a door into a compartment that served as a combination dining space and lounge.
In a closet, I found rain slickers and other foul-weather gear, as well as a well-worn leather satchel, which was empty.
All four triggers snugged in the satchel without distorting it. I was able to close the zipper.
As I pulled the zipper shut, the hand holding the bag and the hand gripping the tab looked like the hands of a stranger, as if I had just awakened in a body that was not mine.
Since the day on which Stormy had died, I had been called upon to do terrible things with these hands. When she had been taken from me, a portion of my innocence had been stolen, as well. But now it seemed to me that these hands had actively thrown away what innocence had not been robbed from me.
I knew that what I had done was right, but what is right is not always clean, and does not always feel good. In even a clear heart, some righteous acts of the harder kind can stir up a sediment of guilt, but that is not a bad thing. If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption.
To dispel the apprehension that I had become someone different from the person I had once been, I turned my right hand palm up. My birthmark is a half-inch-wide crescent, an inch and a half from point to point, milk-white against the pink flesh of my hand.
This was one of the proofs that Stormy and I were destined to be together forever, because she’d had a mark that matched it.
Birthmarks and memories of the blue lake of abiding hope: They confirm that I remain Odd Thomas—perhaps different from what I once was, yet paradoxically the same.
I carried the bag out to the foredeck, where the fog was as thick as ever and the night colder than I remembered.
Here on the starboard side, a steep flight of narrow stairs led up to the top deck, where the bridge was located.
Entering the bridge, I looked up as the woman at the helm turned to stare at me, her hands remaining on the wheel.
I should have realized that with no one at the helm, the tugboat would have been subject to the actions of tides and currents, which would tend to turn it in a lazy vortex. While I had killed Utgard and Buddy, while I had opened the shipping crates, while I had gathered the bomb triggers, the boat had mostly held steady.
I knew at once who she must be.
CHAPTER 39
Over white slacks and an exquisite beaded sweater, she wore a gray coat of supple leather with fox fur at the collar, along the front panels, and at the cuffs.
Setting the satchel on the floor, I said, “No doctor is going to believe you’ve been suffering from a bad shellfish reaction.”
No older than twenty-five, she was beautiful not in the way that women in Joey’s copy of Maxim might have seemed beautiful to him, but as women in a Neiman Marcus catalog might be regarded as beautiful: sensuous but not common, elegant, a generous mouth, fine facial bones, large limpid blue eyes, and not a hard edge to her.
Taking one hand from the wheel, she patted a pocket of her coat. “I’ve got a little bottle of nasty brew to drink before we dock. It fakes some of the classic symptoms.”
Because the Coast Guard had been told that we had put to sea to retrieve a yacht passenger suffering a serious allergic reaction to shellfish, they might follow through with the local hospital to see if in fact such a patient had been admitted.
The dialed-down ping of the radar drew my eyes to the screen. A few pips were revealed at the outermost azimuth rings. The only nearer pip, moving away, must be Junie’s Moonbeam.
“Who’re you?” she asked.
“Harry,” I replied.
“The Harry. I didn’t know there was one.”
“My mother would like to hear it put that way. She thinks I’m the only Harry there is or ever was.”
“It must be nice to have a mother who’s not a bitch.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Valonia.”
“I’ve never heard that one before.”
“It’s from the Latin for acorn. I guess my mother thought I would grow into a great hulking tree. Where’s Utgard?”
From the bridge, she had no view of the afterdeck.
I said, “He’s finishing with … things.”
She smiled. “I’m not a fragile flower.”
I shrugged. “Well.”
“He told me that he would be winnowing the crew.”
“Winnowing. Is that what he called it?”
“You don’t approve of his word choice?”
“I approve that I’m not one of the winnowed.”
“I suppose it matters more to you.”
“Why should it?”
“You knew them, they’re your mates,” Valonia said. “I didn’t know them.”
“You didn’t miss much.”
She liked the ruthlessness. She regarded me with greater interest than before.
“What role do you play in the cast, Harry?”
“I’m a Guildenstern, I guess.”
She frowned. “A Jew?”
“It’s a reference to Shakespeare.”
The frown sweetened into a delicious pout. “You don’t seem like a boy who would live in dusty old books.”
“You don’t seem like a girl who would blow up cities.”
“Because you don’t know me well.”
“Is there a chance I might get to?”
“Right now, I’d say fifty-fifty.”
“I’ll take those odds.”
Because I could not sense whether she was suspicious of me to any extent, I had not ventured closer to Valonia. The more relaxed she became with me, the easier I would be able to subdue her without breaking any pretty thing. She would be a trove of information for the authorities.
Leaning against the doorjamb, I said, “What’s your last name, Valonia?”
“Fontenelle. Remember it.”
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p; “That’s no problem.”
“I’ll be famous one day.”
“I’ve no doubt you will be.”
“What’s your last name, Harry?”
“Lime.”
“Tart,” she said.
“Actually, I’m pretty much monogamous.”
Her laugh was nicer than I had expected, girlish yet robust, and genuine.
I didn’t want to like her laugh. I dreaded hearing in it this trace of merriment that suggested a once-innocent child.
Now I could see that she was even younger than I first thought, no older than twenty or twenty-one.
Valonia’s long hair had been tucked under the fox-fur collar. With one hand behind her neck, she pulled it free. She shook her head, and a wealth of spun gold cascaded around her face.
“Are you ready for the world to change, Harry?”
“I guess I better be.”
“It’s all so old and tired.”
“Not all of it,” I said, openly admiring her.
She liked to be admired.
“They’re going to love him so much,” she said.
“Who?”
“The people.”
“Oh, yeah. Them.”
“They’ll love the way he’ll take charge. Bring order. His compassion and his strength.”
“And his magnificent dental work.”
She laughed, but then chastised me. “The senator’s a great man, Harry. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think so.”
Cautious about being seduced to respond outside the character that I had created—or, rather, borrowed from a Graham Greene novel—I said, “For me, it’s mostly about the money.”
Gazing into the fog, Valonia blew out a poof of breath through puckered lips. “The old, tired world—just gone.”
“Do that again,” I requested.
Staring at me, she puckered and blew.
I said, “Maybe, after all, it’s not entirely about the money.”
Her blue eyes dazzled. “The perpetual arguing, the tiresome debate that never settles anything. No one will miss that.”
“No one,” I agreed, but was overcome by sorrow that she could be so young yet hate so much.
“He’ll shut them up, Harry.”
“It’s time somebody did.”
“And in the end, they’ll like it.”
She inhaled as if trying to clear nasal congestion.
“The endless quarreling,” she said, “when we know the issues were really settled long ago.”
“Ages ago,” I agreed.
She tried to clear her nose again. “The people are going to be so grateful for the New Civility.”
I could hear the uppercase N and C in the way that she said it.
“Do you believe, Harry?”
“Deeply. Plus there’s the money.”
“It’s so wonderful to believe.”
“You come so alive when you say the word.”
“Believe,” she said with childlike yearning. “Believe.”
She inhaled noisily, and again.
“Damn these allergies,” she complained, and reached into a coat pocket for a handkerchief.
From under my sweatshirt, from the small of my back, I drew the gun that held two more rounds.
Her compact pistol, a lady’s gun but deadly, hung up on the lining of her coat pocket as she tried to draw it.
“Valonia, don’t.”
The snagged lining tore.
“Please,” I said.
The gun came free, and in her passion to defend the faith, she fired wildly.
In every direction from the bullet hole, the laminated window beside my head instantly webbed to the limits of its frame.
I shot her once, not just to wound, because it never could have been that way.
Golden hair swirled, shimmered, as she spasmed from the impact. She dropped the little gun, and dropped herself, collapsing toward a needed rest, faceup on the stained and soiled deck, an orchid in the mud.
Snaring her pistol, I knelt beside her.
Her eyes were open, but not yet vacant. She stared at something, perhaps a memory, and then at me.
She said, “I’ll never get to see …”
I took one of her hands in both of mine, and I was not assaulted by the vision of a red tide. That future had been thwarted.
“I’ll never get to see … the new world,” she finished.
“No,” I said. “I spared you that.”
Her limp hand tightened on mine.
She closed her eyes. And at once opened them in alarm.
“Don’t let go,” she pleaded, her voice younger now, without sophistication or artifice.
I promised her, “I won’t.”
The strength in her grip increased, became fierce, and then she had no strength at all.
Although she was gone, I still held her hand and prayed silently that she would not add to her suffering by lingering here in spirit.
I wondered who had turned her free mind from the light into the dark, where and how and when. I wanted to find him, her, every one of them—and kill them all.
In the closet where I had discovered a satchel in which to stow the bomb triggers, on a shelf above the hanging rain gear, I had seen what I needed now. I went down to the foredeck, selected two wool blankets, and returned to the bridge with them.
After shaking open one of the blankets, I refolded it lengthwise to make a soft and simple catafalque on which to place her.
I lifted her in the cradle of my arms and moved her onto the woolen cushion. She proved to be lighter than I expected. She was petite but had projected herself larger in life.
Before her eyes locked open, I closed her lids with my thumbs and held them for a moment. I placed her right hand atop her left, on her breast.
I shook out the second blanket, folded it much like the first, and covered Valonia Fontenelle, who after all would never be famous. Or infamous.
Questing fog crept across the threshold, seduced by the warmth of the bridge. I stepped outside and closed the door.
I threw Birdie Hopkins’s handgun into the sea.
At the railing on the open portion of the bridge deck, I stood for a while, staring down at what the fog allowed me to see of the rolling ocean.
Within half an hour, I had killed three men and a woman—but I had not murdered anyone. I combed the fine hairs of philosophy, assuring myself that I had found the part between moral and immoral.
With no one at the helm, the action of tides and currents had begun to turn the tugboat in the lazy vortex that nature preferred.
On the blue lake of abiding hope, the sun had been warm and every soft breeze a caress, and the future had waited to be dreamed.
Below me now, the ocean was not blue, and I could not see any hope in it, but the ocean did abide.
CHAPTER 40
On Malo Suerte lake, near Pico Mundo, I had on occasion, for pay, driven sportfishing boats of a size to host parties, but I had never been behind the helm of a vessel as large as the tugboat. I had not driven anything on the open ocean, either.
The control console was similar to those on sportfishers. Port-engine clutch and starboard-engine clutch to the left, wheel in the center, port throttle and starboard throttle to the right. Near the throttles, a switch marked ENGINE STOP. The gauge board: gear-oil pressure, engine-oil pressure, water temperature, voltmeter, tachometers, bilge and fuel alarms.
Because the tug had a state-of-the-art GPS navigation system with a large sea-map monitor, I wouldn’t have much need to consult the compass. On the screen now, I could see the boat’s position at the center, the relevant portion of the California coast on the right, because the vessel currently faced north.
For a moment, I studied the radar display as the heading flash picked out pips. Revealed were the same number as before, none of them closer, and one—Junie’s Moonbeam—much farther away.
Either Utgard had turned off the depth-finder or, because of his familiarity with the ar
ea, had never activated it. During the short cruise I would be taking, I wouldn’t need sonar until near the end, but I switched it on.
I tried not to think about the dead woman on the deck nearby and the three other corpses aboard. I focused on the task of getting the nukes to a place from which they could not easily be transshipped before trustworthy authorities could gain possession of them.
The tugboat faced north. The abandoned boatyard south of Rooster Point, where trucks waited to transport the bombs to distant cities, also lay to the north.
As I began to bring the tug around to the south, a phone rang with the most familiar notes of “Ode to Joy.” It had been left atop the gauge board, directly in front of me.
Most likely, this was Utgard’s phone. By now, he should have confirmed to someone onshore that the nuclear weapons had been received from Junie’s Moonbeam and that he was proceeding to the rendezvous at the boatyard.
I doubted that Mr. Sinatra’s paranormal rampage had disabled Hoss Shackett any more than it had Utgard. This incoming call was surely from the chief.
By the time I brought the boat around due south, the call had gone to voice mail, and after a pause, the caller rang again. I let it go to voice mail a second time.
The conspirators onshore now knew something had gone wrong.
Because I had changed the boat’s course 180 degrees, the GPS sea map currently showed the coastline on the left side of the screen. A legend identified the harbor as MAGIC BEACH; and under the words were numbers that meant nothing to me.
Because I had found employees of the harbor department to be arrogant, rude, and homicidal, I declined to give them any more of my business. I would not be returning to the harbor.
Serenaded by the soft ping of radar and by the louder pong of sonar, I throttled up and drove the tugboat south, as if I knew what I was doing, protected by electronics from being misled by singing sea nymphs perched on hull-shredding rocks.
No doubt I remained vulnerable to kraken and other sea serpents of such mammoth scale that they could capsize ships and eat people as casually as we take sardines from the can. I intended to remain aboard for fifteen minutes at the very most, however, so it was not likely that the tug would be seized in the tentacles of a Kong-size octopus and dragged down twenty thousand leagues.