Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder

by Dean Koontz

  "You're a good writer," Karl said. "I've read a couple of your books

  since Tuesday night. Take all this, write up an explanation of it, an

  explanation of what happened to you and your family. I'm going to leave

  you the name of the owner of a major newspaper and a man high in the

  FBI. I'm confident that neither of them is part of the Network--because

  both of them were on Alfie's list of future targets.

  Send your explanation and one set of discs and tapes to each of them.

  Mail it blind, of course, no return address, and from another state, not

  Wyoming."

  "Shouldn't you do this?" Paige asked.

  "I'll try again if you don't get the kind of reaction I expect you will.

  But it's better coming from you first. Your disappearance, the action

  in Mission Viejo, the murders of your parents, the bodies I've made sure

  they found in that bell tower near your folks' cabin--all of that has

  kept your story hot. The Network has made sure it's kept hot, 'cause

  they're desperate for someone to find you for them. Let's use your

  notoriety to make it all backfire on them if we can."

  The day was cool but not cold. The sky was a crystalline blue.

  Marty and Karl went for a walk along the perimeter of the woods, always

  keeping the cabin in sight.

  "This Alfie," Marty said.

  "What about him?"

  "Was he the only one?"

  "The first and only operative clone. Others are being grown."

  "We have to stop that."

  "We will."

  "Okay. Suppose we blow the Network apart," Marty wondered.

  "Their house of cards collapses. Afterward . . . can we ever go back

  home, resume our lives?"

  Karl shook his head. "I don't intend to. Don't dare. Some of them

  will slip the noose. And these are people who hold a grudge from Sunday

  to Hell and back. Good haters. You ruin their lives or even just the

  lives of people in their families, and sooner or later they'll kill all

  of you."

  "Then the Gault name isn't just temporary cover?"

  "It's the best ID you can get. As good as real paper. I got it from

  sources the Network doesn't know about. No one will ever see through

  this ID . . . or track you down by it."

  "My career, income from my books . .."

  "Forget it," Karl said. "You're on a new voyage of discovery, outward

  to worlds unknown."

  "And you've got a new name too?"

  Yes."

  "None of my business what it is, huh?"

  "Exactly."

  Karl left that same afternoon, an hour before dusk.

  As they accompanied him to the Range Rover, he withdrew an envelope from

  an inside pocket of his tweed jacket and handed it to Paige, explaining

  that it was the grant deed to the cabin and the land on which it stood.

  "I bought and prepared two getaway properties, one at each end of the

  country, so I'd be prepared for this day when it came. Owned them both

  under untraceable false names. I've transferred this one to Ann and

  John Gault, since I can only use one of them."

  He seemed embarrassed when Paige hugged him.

  "Karl," Marty said, "what would have happened to us without you? We owe

  you everything."

  The big man was actually blushing. "You'd have done all right, somehow.

  You're survivors. Anything I've done for you, it's only what anyone

  would have."

  "Not these days," Marty said.

  "Even these days," Karl said, "there are more good people than not. I

  really believe that. I have to."

  At the Range Rover, Charlotte and Emily kissed Karl goodbye because they

  all knew, without having to say it, that they would never see him again.

  Emily gave him Peepers. "You need someone," she said. "You're all

  alone. Besides, he'll never get used to calling me Suzie Lori.

  He's your pet now."

  "Thank you, Emily. I'll take good care of him."

  When Karl got behind the wheel and closed the door, Marty leaned in the

  open window. "If we wreck the Network, you think they'll ever put it

  back together again?"

  "It or something like it," Karl said without hesitation.

  Unsettled, Marty said, "I guess we'll know if they do . . .

  when they cancel all elections."

  "Oh, elections would never be canceled, at least not in any way that was

  ever apparent," Karl said as he started the Rover. "They'd go on just

  as usual, with competing political parties, conventions, debates, bitter

  campaigns, all the hoopla and shouting. But every one of the candidates

  would be selected from Network loyalists. If they ever do take over,

  John, only they will know."

  Marty was suddenly as cold as he had ever been in the blizzard on

  Tuesday night.

  Karl raised one hand in the split-finger greeting that Marty recognized

  from Star Trek. "Live long and prosper," he said, and left them.

  Marty stood in the gravel driveway, watching the Rover until it reached

  the county road, turned left, and dwindled out of sight.

  That December and throughout the following year, when the head lines

  screamed of the Network scandal, treason, political conspiracy,

  assassination, and one world crisis after another, John and Ann Gault

  didn't pay as much attention to the newspapers and the television news

  as they had expected they would. They had new lives to build, which was

  not a simple undertaking.

  Ann cut her blond hair short and dyed it brown. Before meeting any of

  their neighbors living in the scattered cabins and ranches of that rural

  area, John grew a beard, not to his surprise, it came in more than half

  gray, and a lot of gray began to show up on his head, as well.

  A simple tint changed Rebecca's hair from blond to auburn, and Suzie

  Lori was sufficiently transformed with a new and much shorter style.

  Both girls were growing fast. Time would swiftly blur the resemblance

  between them and whoever they once might have been.

  Remembering to use new names was easy compared to creating and

  committing to memory a simple but credible false past. They made a game

  of it, rather like Look Who's the Monkey Now.

  The nightmares were persistent. Though the enemy they had known was as

  comfortable in daylight as not, they irrationally viewed each nightfall

  with an uneasiness that people had felt in ancient and more

  superstitious times. And sudden noises made everybody jump.

  Christmas Eve had been the first time that John dared to hope they would

  really be able to imagine a new life and find happiness again.

  It was then that Suzie Lori inquired about the popcorn.

  "What popcorn?" John asked.

  "Santa's evil twin put ten pounds in the microwave," she said, "even

  though that much corn wouldn't fit. But even if it would fit, what

  happened when it started to pop?"

  That night, story hour was held for the first time in more than three

  weeks. Thereafter, it became routine.

  In late January, they felt safe enough to register Rebecca and Suzie

  Lori in the public school system.

  By spring, there were new friends and a growing store of Gault family

  memories that were not fabricated.

  Because they had seven
ty thousand in cash and owned their humble house

  outright, they were under little pressure to find work.

  They also had four boxes full of the first editions of the early novels

  of Martin Stillwater. The cover of Time magazine had asked a question

  that would never be answered--Where is Martin Stillwater?--and first

  editions that had once been worth a couple of hundred dollars each on

  the collectors' market had begun selling, by spring, for five times that

  price, they would probably continue to appreciate faster than blue-chip

  investments in the years to come. Sold one or two at a time, in far

  cities, they would keep the family nest egg fat during lean years.

  John presented himself to new neighbors and acquaintances as a former

  insurance salesman from New York City. He claimed to have come into a

  substantial though not enormous inheritance. He was indulging a

  lifelong dream of living in a rural setting, struggling to be a poet.

  "If I don't start selling some poems in a few years, maybe I'll write a

  novel," he sometimes said, "and if that doesn't turn out right--then

  I'll start worrying."

  Ann was content to be seen as a housewife, however, freed from the

  pressures of the past--troubled clients and freeway commuting--she

  rediscovered a talent for drawing that she had not tapped since high

  school. She began doing illustrations for the poems and stories in her

  husband's ring-bound notebook of original compositions, which he had

  been writing for years, Stories for Rebecca and Suzie Lori.

  They had lived in Wyoming five years when Santa's Evil Twin by John

  Gault with illustrations by Ann Gault became a smash Christmas

  bestseller. They allowed no jacket photo of author and artist. They

  politely declined offers of promotional tours and interviews, prefer

  ring a quiet life and the chance to do more books for children.

  The girls remained healthy, grew tall, and Rebecca began selectively

  dating boys, all of whom Suzie Lori found wanting in one way or another.

  Sometimes John and Ann felt they lived too much in a fantasy, and they

  made an effort to keep up with current events, watching for signs and

  portents that they didn't even like to discuss with each other. But the

  world was endlessly troubled and tedious. Too few people seemed able to

  imagine life without the crushing hand of one government or another, one

  war or another, one form of hatred or another, so the Gaults always lost

  interest in the news and returned to the world they imagined for

  themselves.

  One day a paperback novel arrived in the mail. The plain brown envelope

  bore no return address, and no note of any kind was included with the

  book. It was a science-fiction novel set in the far future, when

  humankind had conquered the stars but not all of its problems.

  The title was The Clone Rebellion. John and Ann read it.

  They found it to be admirably well-imagined, and they regretted that

  they would never have the opportunity to express their admiration.

  the end.