by Dean Koontz
At times he envied his father and his uncles. Most of them had served their country openly, in a supremely visible fashion, where everyone could see and admire their selfless public-spiritedness. Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, the Ambassador to France . . . in positions of that nature, a man was appreciated and respected.
George, on the other hand, hadn’t filled a post of genuine stature and authority until six years ago, when he was thirty-six. During his twenties and early thirties, he had labored at a variety of lesser jobs for the government. These diplomatic and intelligence-gathering assignments were never an insult to his family name, but they were always minor postings to embassies in smaller countries like Iceland and Ecuador and Tonga, nothing for which The New York Times would deign to acknowledge his existence.
Then, six years ago, the Network had been formed, and the President had given George the task of developing a reliable South American bureau of the new intelligence agency. That had been exciting, challenging, important work. George had been directly responsible for the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars and, eventually, for the control of hundreds of agents in a dozen countries. After three years the President had declared himself delighted with the accomplishments in South America, and he had asked George to take charge of one of the Network’s domestic bureaus—Nevada—which had been terribly mismanaged. This slot was one of the half-dozen most powerful in the Network’s executive hierarchy. George was encouraged by the President to believe that eventually he would be promoted to the bureau chief of the entire western half of the country—and then all the way to the top, if only he could get the floundering western division functioning as smoothly as the South American and Nevada offices. In time he would take the director’s chair in Washington and would bear full responsibility for all domestic and foreign intelligence operations. With that title he would be one of the most powerful men in the United States, more of a force to be reckoned with than any mere Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense could hope to be.
But he couldn’t tell anyone about his achievements. He could never hope to receive the public acclaim and honor that had been heaped upon other men in his family. The Network was clandestine and must remain clandestine if it was to have any value. At least half of the people who worked for it did not even realize it existed; some thought they were employed by the FBI; others were sure they worked for the CIA; and still others believed that they were in the hire of various branches of the Treasury Department, including the Secret Service. None of those people could compromise the Network. Only bureau chiefs, their immediate staffs, station chiefs in major cities, and senior field officers who had proved themselves and their loyalty—only those people knew the true nature of their employers and their work. The moment that the news media became aware of the Network’s existence, all was lost.
As he sat in the dimly lighted cabin of the fan-jet and watched the clouds racing below, Alexander wondered what his father and his uncles would say if they knew that his service to his country had often required him to issue kill orders. More shocking still to the sensibilities of patrician Easterners like them: on three occasions, in South America, Alexander had been in a position where it had been necessary for him to pull the assassin’s trigger himself. He had enjoyed those murders so immensely, had been so profoundly thrilled by them, that he had, by choice, performed the executioner’s role on half a dozen other assignments. What would the elder Alexanders, the famous statesmen, think if they knew he’d soiled his hands with blood? As for the fact that it was sometimes his job to order other men to kill, he supposed his family would understand. The Alexanders were all idealists when they were discussing the way things ought to be, but they were also hardheaded pragmatists when dealing with the way things actually were. They knew that the worlds of domestic military security and international espionage were not children’s playgrounds. George liked to believe that they might even find it in their hearts to forgive him for having pulled the trigger himself.
After all, he had never killed an ordinary citizen or a person of real worth. His targets had always been spies, traitors; more than a few of them had been cold-blooded killers themselves. Scum. He had only killed scum. It wasn’t a pretty job, but it also wasn’t without a measure of real dignity and heroism. At least that was the way George saw it; he thought of himself as heroic. Yes, he was sure that his father and uncles would give him their blessings—if only he were permitted to tell them.
The jet hit an especially bad patch of turbulence. It yawed, bounced, shuddered.
Kurt Hensen snorted in his sleep but didn’t wake.
When the plane settled down once more, Alexander looked out the window at the milky-white, moonlit, feminine roundness of the clouds below, and he thought of the Evans woman. She was quite lovely. Her file folder was on the seat beside him. He picked it up, opened it, and stared at her photograph. Quite lovely indeed. He decided he would kill her himself when the time came, and that thought gave him an instant erection.
He enjoyed killing. He didn’t try to pretend otherwise with himself, no matter what face he had to present to the world. All of his life, for reasons he had never been able to fully ascertain, he had been fascinated by death, intrigued by the form and nature and possibilities of it, enthralled by the study and theory of its meaning. He considered himself a messenger of death, a divinely appointed headsman. Murder was, in many ways, more thrilling to him than sex. His taste for violence would not have been tolerated for long in the old FBI—perhaps not even in the new, thoroughly politicized FBI—or in many other congressionally monitored police agencies. But in this unknown organization, in this secret and incomparably cozy place, he thrived.
He closed his eyes and thought about Christina Evans.
29
IN TINA’S DREAM, DANNY WAS AT THE FAR END OF A long tunnel. He was in chains, sitting in the center of a small, well-lighted cavern, but the passageway that led to him was shadowy and reeked of danger. Danny called to her again and again, begging her to save him before the roof of his underground prison caved in and buried him alive. She started down the tunnel toward him, determined to get him out of there—and something reached for her from a narrow cleft in the wall. She was peripherally aware of a soft, firelike glow from beyond the cleft, and of a mysterious figure silhouetted against that reddish backdrop. She turned, and she was looking into the grinning face of Death, as if he were peering out at her from the bowels of Hell. The crimson eyes. The shriveled flesh. The lacework of maggots on his cheek. She cried out, but then she saw that Death could not quite reach her. The hole in the wall was not wide enough for him to step through, into her passageway; he could only thrust one arm at her, and his long, bony fingers were an inch or two short of her. Danny began calling again, and she continued down the dusky tunnel toward him. A dozen times she passed chinks in the wall, and Death glared out at her from every one of those apertures, screamed and cursed and raged at her, but none of the holes was large enough to allow him through. She reached Danny, and when she touched him, the chains fell magically away from his arms and legs. She said, “I was scared.” And Danny said, “I made the holes in the walls smaller. I made sure he couldn’t reach you, couldn’t hurt you.”
At eight-thirty Friday morning Tina came awake, smiling and excited. She shook Elliot until she woke him.
Blinking sleepily, he sat up. “What’s wrong?”
“Danny just sent me another dream.”
Taking in her broad smile, he said, “Obviously, it wasn’t the nightmare.”
“Not at all. Danny wants us to come to him. He wants us just to walk into the place where they’re keeping him and take him out.”
“We’d be killed before we could reach him. We can’t just charge in like the cavalry. We’ve got to use the media and the courts to free him.”
“I don’t think so.”
“The two of us can’t fight the entire organization that’s behind Kennebeck plus the staff of some secret military r
esearch center.”
“Danny’s going to make it safe for us,” she said confidently. “He’s going to use this power of his to help us get in there.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“You said you believed.”
“I do,” Elliot said, yawning and stretching elaborately. “I do believe. But . . . how can he help us? How can he guarantee our safety?”
“I don’t know. But that’s what he was telling me in the dream. I’m sure of it.”
She recounted the dream in detail, and Elliot admitted that her interpretation wasn’t strained.
“But even if Danny could somehow get us in,” he said, “we don’t know where they’re keeping him. This secret installation could be anywhere. And maybe it doesn’t even exist. And if it does exist, they might not be holding him there anyway.”
“It exists, and that’s where he is,” she said, trying to sound more certain than she actually was.
She was within reach of Danny. She felt almost as if she had him in her arms again, and she didn’t want anyone to tell her that he might be a hair’s breadth beyond her grasp.
“Okay,” Elliot said, wiping at the corners of his sleep-matted eyes. “Let’s say this secret installation exists. That doesn’t help us a whole hell of a lot. It could be anywhere in those mountains.”
“No,” she said. “It has to be within a few miles of where Jaborski intended to go with the scouts.”
“Okay. That’s probably true. But that covers a hell of a lot of rugged terrain. We couldn’t begin to conduct a thorough search of it.”
Tina’s confidence couldn’t be shaken. “Danny will pinpoint it for us.”
“Danny’s going to tell us where he is?”
“He’s going to try, I think. I sensed that in the dream.”
“How’s he going to do it?”
“I don’t know. But I have this feeling that if we just find some way . . . some means of focusing his energy, channeling it . . .”
“Such as?”
She stared at the tangled bedclothes as if she were searching for inspiration in the creases of the linens. Her expression would have been appropriate to the face of a gypsy fortune-teller peering with a clairvoyant frown at tea leaves.
“Maps!” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“Don’t they publish terrain maps of the wilderness areas? Backpackers and other nature lovers would need them. Not minutely detailed things. Basically maps that show the lay of the land—hills, valleys, the courses of rivers and streams, footpaths, abandoned logging trails, that sort of thing. I’m sure Jaborski had maps. I know he did. I saw them at the parent-son scout meeting when he explained why the trip would be perfectly safe.”
“I suppose any sporting-goods store in Reno ought to have maps of at least the nearest parts of the Sierras.”
“Maybe if we can get a map and spread it out . . . well, maybe Danny will find a way to show us exactly where he is.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure yet.” She threw back the covers and got out of bed. “Let’s get the maps first. We’ll worry about the rest of it later. Come on. Let’s get showered and dressed. The stores will be open in an hour or so.”
Because of the foul-up at the Bellicosti place, George Alexander didn’t get to bed until five-thirty Friday morning. Still furious with his subordinates for letting Stryker and the woman escape again, he had difficulty getting to sleep. He finally nodded off around 7:00 A.M.
At ten o’clock he was awakened by the telephone. The director was calling from Washington. They used an electronic scrambling device, so they could speak candidly, and the old man was furious and characteristically blunt.
As Alexander endured the director’s accusations and demands, he realized that his own future with the Network was at stake. If he failed to stop Stryker and the Evans woman, his dream of assuming the director’s chair in a few years would never become a reality.
After the old man hung up, Alexander called his own office, in no mood to be told that Elliot Stryker and Christina Evans were still at large. But that was exactly what he heard. He ordered men pulled off other jobs and assigned to the manhunt.
“I want them found before another day passes,” Alexander said. “That bastard’s killed one of us now. He can’t get away with that. I want him eliminated. And the bitch with him. Both of them. Dead.”
30
TWO SPORTING-GOODS STORES AND TWO GUN shops were within easy walking distance of the hotel. The first sporting-goods dealer did not carry the maps, and although the second usually had them, it was currently sold out. Elliot and Tina found what they needed in one of the gun shops: a set of twelve wilderness maps of the Sierras, designed with backpackers and hunters in mind. The set came in a leatherette-covered case and sold for a hundred dollars.
Back in the hotel room, they opened one of the maps on the bed, and Elliot said, “Now what?”
For a moment Tina considered the problem. Then she went to the desk, opened the center drawer, and withdrew a folder of hotel stationery. In the folder was a cheap plastic ballpoint pen with the hotel name on it. With the pen, she returned to the bed and sat beside the open map.
She said, “People who believe in the occult have a thing they call ‘automatic writing.’ Ever hear of it?”
“Sure. Spirit writing. A ghost supposedly guides your hand to deliver a message from beyond. Always sounded like the worst sort of bunkum to me.”
“Well, bunkum or not, I’m going to try something like that. Except, I don’t need a ghost to guide my hand. I’m hoping Danny can do it.”
“Don’t you have to be in a trance, like a medium at a seance?”
“I’m just going to completely relax, make myself open and receptive. I’ll hold the pen against the map, and maybe Danny can draw the route for us.”
Elliot pulled a chair beside the bed and sat. “I don’t believe for a minute it’s going to work. Totally nuts. But I’ll be as quiet as a mouse and give it a chance.”
Tina stared at the map and tried to think of nothing but the appealing greens, blues, yellows, and pinks that the cartographers had used to indicate various types of terrain. She allowed her eyes to swim out of focus.
A minute passed.
Two minutes. Three.
She tried closing her eyes.
Another minute. Two.
Nothing.
She turned the map over and tried the other side of it.
Still nothing.
“Give me another map,” she said.
Elliot withdrew another one from the leatherette case and handed it to her. He refolded the first map as she unfolded the second.
Half an hour and five maps later, Tina’s hand suddenly skipped across the paper as if someone had bumped her arm.
She felt a peculiar pulling sensation that seemed to come from within her hand, and she stiffened in surprise.
Instantly the invasive power retreated from her.
“What was that?” Elliot asked.
“Danny. He tried.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. But he startled me, and I guess even the little bit of resistance I offered was enough to push him away. At least we know this is the right map. Let me try again.”
She put the pen at the edge of the map once more, and she let her eyes drift out of focus.
The air temperature plummeted.
She tried not to think about the chill. She tried to banish all thoughts.
Her right hand, in which she held the pen, grew rapidly colder than any other part of her. She felt the unpleasant, inner pulling again. Her fingers ached with the cold. Abruptly her hand swung across the map, then back, then described a series of circles; the pen made meaningless scrawls on the paper. After half a minute, she felt the power leave her hand again.
“No good,” she said.
The map flew into the air, as if someone had tossed it in anger or frustration.
Elliot got out of his
chair and reached for the map—but it spun into the air again. It flapped noisily to the other end of the room and then back again, finally falling like a dead bird onto the floor at Elliot’s feet.
“Jesus,” he said softly. “The next time I read a story in the newspaper about some guy who says he was picked up in a flying saucer and taken on a tour of the universe, I won’t be so quick to laugh. If I see many more inanimate objects dancing around, I’m going to start believing in everything, no matter how freaky.”
Tina got up from the bed, massaging her cold right hand. “I guess I’m offering too much resistance. But it feels so weird when he takes control . . . I can’t help stiffening a little. I guess you were right about needing to be in a trance.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. I’m a good cook, but I’m not a hypnotist.”
She blinked. “Hypnosis! Of course! That’ll probably do the trick.”
“Maybe it will. But where do you expect to find a hypnotist? The last time I looked, they weren’t setting up shops on street corners.”
“Billy Sandstone,” she said.
“Who?”
“He’s a hypnotist. He lives right here in Reno. He has a stage act. It’s a brilliant act. I wanted to use him in Magyck!, but he was tied up in an exclusive contract with a chain of Reno-Tahoe hotels. If you can get hold of Billy, he can hypnotize me. Then maybe I’ll be relaxed enough to make this automatic writing work.”
“Do you know his phone number?”
“No. And it’s probably not listed. But I do know his agent’s number. I can get through to him that way.”
She hurried to the telephone.
31
BILLY SANDSTONE WAS IN HIS LATE THIRTIES, AS small and lean as a jockey, and his watchword seemed to be “neatness.” His shoes shone like black mirrors. The creases in his slacks were as sharp as blades, and his blue sport shirt was starched, crisp. His hair was razor-cut, and he groomed his mustache so meticulously that it almost appeared to have been painted on his upper lip.