by Dean Koontz
Now, descending through the shadowy forest and at last reaching the first of the half-cleared properties where houses were tucked in among the trees, Ben wondered how Anson Sharp, stripped of rank and dishonorably discharged, could have been accepted into training as a DSA agent. A man gone bad, like Sharp, usually continued skidding downward once his slide began. By now he should have been on his second or third term in prison for civilian crimes. At best, you could have expected to encounter him as a seedy grifter scratching out a dishonest living, so pathetically small-time that he did not draw the notice of the authorities. Even if he had cleaned up his act, he could not have wiped a dishonorable discharge off his record. And with that discredit, he would have been summarily rejected by any law-enforcement agency, especially by an organization with standards as high as those of the Defense Security Agency.
So how the hell did he swing it? Ben wondered.
He chewed on that question as he climbed over a split-rail fence and cautiously skirted a two-story brick and weathered-pine chalet, dashing from tree to tree and bush to bush, staying out of sight as much as possible. If someone looked out a window and saw a man with a shotgun in one hand and a big revolver tucked into the waistband at his back, a call to the county sheriff would be inevitable.
Assuming that Sharp wasn’t lying when he had identified himself as a Defense Security Agency operative—and there seemed no point in lying about it—the next thing Ben had to wonder about was how far Sharp had risen in the DSA. After all, it seemed far too coincidental for Sharp to have been assigned, by mere chance, to an investigation involving Ben. More likely Sharp had arranged his assignment when he had read the Leben file and discovered that Ben, his old and perhaps mostly forgotten nemesis, had a relationship with Rachael. He’d seen a long-delayed chance for revenge and had seized it. But surely an ordinary agent could not choose assignments, which meant Sharp must be in a sufficiently high position to set his own work schedule. Worse than that: Sharp was of such formidable rank that he could open fire on Ben without provocation and expect to be able to cover up a murder committed in the plain sight of one of his fellow DSA operatives.
With the threat of Anson Sharp layered on top of all the other threats that he and Rachael faced, Ben began to feel as if he were caught up in a war again. In war, incoming fire usually started up when you least expected it, and from the most unlikely source and direction. Which was exactly what Anson Sharp’s appearance was: surprise fire from the most unlikely source.
At the third mountainside house, Ben nearly walked in among four young boys who were engaged in their own stealthy game of war, alerted at the last minute when one of them sprang from cover and opened fire on another with a cap-loaded machine gun. For the first time in his life, Ben experienced a vivid flashback to the war, one of those mental traumas that the media ascribed to every veteran. He fell and rolled behind several low-growing dogwoods, where he lay listening to his pounding heart, stifling a scream for half a minute until the flashback passed.
None of the boys had seen him, and when he set out again, he crawled and belly-crawled from one point of cover to another. From the leafy dogwood to a clump of wild azaleas. From the azaleas to a low limestone formation, where the desiccated corpse of a ground squirrel lay as if in warning. Then over a small hill, through rough weeds that scratched his face, under another split-rail fence.
Five minutes later, almost forty minutes after setting out from the cabin, he bulled his way down a brush-covered slope and into a dry drainage ditch alongside the state route that circled the lake.
Forty minutes, for God’s sake.
How far into the lonely desert had Rachael gotten in forty minutes?
Don’t think about that. Just keep moving.
He crouched in the tall weeds for a moment, catching his breath, then stood up and looked both ways. No one was in sight. No traffic was coming or going on the two-lane blacktop.
Considering that he had no intention of throwing away either the shotgun or the Combat Magnum, which made him frightfully conspicuous, he was lucky to find himself here on a Tuesday and at this hour. The state route would not have been as lightly used at any other time. During the early morning, the road would be busy with boaters, fishermen, and campers on their way to the lake, and later many of them would be returning. But in the middle of the afternoon—it was 2:55—they were comfortably settled for the day. He was also fortunate it was not a weekend, for then the road would have been heavily traveled regardless of the hour.
Deciding that he would be able to hear oncoming traffic before it drew into sight—and would, therefore, have time to conceal himself—he climbed out of the ditch and headed north on the pavement, hoping to find a car to steal.
27
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
By 2:55, Rachael was through the El Cajon Pass, still ten miles south of Victorville and almost forty-five miles from Barstow.
This was the last stretch of the interstate on which indications of civilization could be seen with any frequency. Even here, except for Victorville itself and the isolated houses and businesses strung between it and Hesperia and Apple Valley, there was mostly just a vast emptiness of white sand, striated rock, seared desert scrub, Joshua trees and other cactuses. During the hundred and sixty miles between Barstow and Las Vegas, there would be virtually only two outposts—Calico, the ghost town (with a cluster of attendant restaurants, service stations, and a motel or two), and Baker, which was the gateway to Death Valley National Monument and which was little more than a pit stop that flashed by in a few seconds, gone so quickly that it almost seemed like a mirage. Halloran Springs, Cal Neva, and Stateline were out there, too, but none of them really qualified as a town, and in one case the population was fewer than fifty souls. Here, where the great Mojave Desert began, humankind had tested the wasteland’s dominion, but after Barstow its rule remained undisputed.
If Rachael had not been so worried about Benny, she would have enjoyed the endless vistas, the power and responsiveness of the big Mercedes, and the sense of escape and release that always buoyed her during a trip across the Mojave. But she could not stop thinking about him, and she wished she had not left him alone, even though he had made a good argument for his plan and had given her little choice. She considered turning around and going back, but he might have left by the time she reached the cabin. She might even drive straight into the arms of the police if she returned to Arrowhead, so she kept the Mercedes moving at a steady sixty miles an hour toward Barstow.
Five miles south of Victorville, she was startled by a strange hollow thumping that seemed to come from underneath the car: four or five sharp knocks, then silence. She swore under her breath at the prospect of a breakdown. Letting the speed fall to fifty and then slowly to forty, she listened closely to the Mercedes for more than half a mile.
The hum of the tires on the pavement.
The purr of the engine.
The soft whisper of the air-conditioning.
No knocking.
When the unsettling sound did not recur, she accelerated to sixty again and continued to listen expectantly, figuring that the unknown trouble was something that occurred only at higher speeds. But when, after another mile, there was no noise, she decided she must have run over potholes in the pavement. She had not seen any potholes, and she could not recall that the car had been jolted simultaneously with the thumping sound, but she could think of no other explanation. The Mercedes’s suspension system and heavy-duty shocks were superb, which would have minimized the jolt of a few minor bumps, and perhaps the strange sound itself had distracted her from whatever little vibration there had been.
For a few miles, Rachael remained edgy, not exactly waiting for the entire drive train to drop out with a great crash or for the engine to explode, but half expecting some trouble that would delay her. However, when the car continued to perform with its usual quiet reliability, she relaxed, and her thoughts drifted back to Benny.
The green Chevy sedan
had been damaged in the collision with the blue Ford—bent grille, smashed headlight, crumpled fender—but its function had not been impaired. Peake had driven down the dirt road to gravel to macadam to the state route that circled the lake, with Sharp sitting in the passenger seat, scanning the woods around them, the silencer-equipped pistol in his lap. Sharp had been confident (he said) that Shadway had gone in another direction, well away from the lake, but he had been vigilant nonetheless.
Peake had expected a shotgun blast to hit the side window and take him out at any moment. But he got down to the state route alive.
They had cruised back and forth on the main road until they had found a line of six cars and pickups parked along the berm. Those vehicles probably belonged to anglers who had gone down through the woods to the nearby lake, to a favorite but hard-to-reach fishing hole. Sharp had decided that Shadway would come off the mountain to the south of the cars and, perhaps recalling having passed them on his way to the cabin turnoff, would come north on the state route—maybe using one of the drainage ditches for cover or even staying in the forest parallel to the road—with the intention of hot-wiring new wheels for himself. Peake had slipped the sedan behind the last vehicle in the line of six, a dirty and battered Dodge station wagon, pulling over just a bit farther than the cars in front, so Shadway would not be able to see the Chevy clearly when he walked in from the south.
Now Peake and Sharp slumped low in the front seat, sitting just high enough to see through the windshield and through the windows of the station wagon in front of them. They were ready to move fast at the first sign of anyone messing with one of the cars. Or at least Sharp was ready. Peake was still in a quandary.
The trees rustled in the gusty breeze.
A wicked-looking dragonfly swooped past the windshield on softly thrumming, iridescent wings.
The dashboard clock ticked faintly, and Peake had the weird but perhaps explicable feeling that they were sitting on a time bomb.
“He’ll show up in the next five minutes,” Sharp said.
I hope not, Peake thought.
“We’ll waste the bastard, all right,” Sharp said.
Not me, Peake thought.
“He’ll be expecting us to keep cruising the road, back and forth, looking for him. He won’t expect us to anticipate him and be lying in wait here. He’ll walk right into us.”
God, I hope not, Peake thought. I hope he heads south instead of north. Or maybe goes over the top of the mountain and down the other side and never comes near this road. Or God, please, how about just letting him cross this road and go down to the lake and walk across the water and off onto the other shore?
Peake said, “Looks to me as if he’s got more firepower than we do. I mean, I saw a shotgun. That’s something to think about.”
“He won’t use it on us,” Sharp said.
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a prissy-assed moralist, that’s why. A sensitive type. Worries about his goddamn soul too much. His type can justify killing only in the middle of a war—and only a war he believes in—or in some other situation where he has absolutely no other choice but to kill in order to save himself.”
“Yeah, well, but if we start shooting at him, he won’t have any choice except to shoot back. Right?”
“You just don’t understand him. In a situation like this—which isn’t a damn war—if there’s any place to run, if he’s not backed into a tight corner, then he’ll always choose to run instead of fighting. It’s the morally superior choice, you see, and he likes to think of himself as a morally superior guy. Out here in these woods, he’s got plenty of places to run. So if we shoot and hit him, it’s over. But if we miss, he won’t shoot back—not that pussy-faced hypocrite—he’ll run, and we’ll have another chance to track him down and take another whack at him, and he’ll keep giving us chances until, sooner or later, he either shakes loose of us for good or we blow him away. Just for God’s sake don’t ever back him into a corner; always leave him an out. When he’s running, we have a chance of shooting him in the back, which is the wisest thing we could do, because the guy was in Marine Recon, and he was good, better than most, the best—I have to give him that much—the best. And he seems to’ve stayed in condition. So if he had to do it, he could take your head off with his bare hands.”
Peake was unable to decide which of these new revelations was most appalling: that, to settle a grudge of Sharp’s, they were going to kill not only an innocent man but a man with an unusually complex and faithfully observed moral code; or that they were going to shoot him in the back if they had the chance; or that their target would put his own life at extreme risk rather than casually waste them, though they were prepared to casually waste him; or that, if given no other choice, the guy had the ability to utterly destroy them without working up a sweat. Peake had last been to bed yesterday afternoon, almost twenty-two hours ago, and he badly needed sleep, but his grainy eyes were open wide and his mind was alert as he contemplated the wealth of bad news that he had just received.
Sharp leaned forward suddenly, as if he’d spotted Shadway coming up from the south, but it must have been nothing, for he leaned back in his seat again and let out his pent-up breath.
He’s as scared as he is angry, Peake thought.
Peake steeled himself to ask a question that would most likely anger or at least irritate Sharp. “You know him, sir?”
“Yeah,” Sharp said sourly, unwilling to elaborate.
“From where?”
“Another place.”
“When?”
“Way back,” Sharp said in a tone of voice that made it clear there were to be no more questions.
From the beginning of this investigation yesterday evening, Peake had been surprised that someone as high as the deputy director would plunge right into the fieldwork, shoulder to shoulder with junior agents, instead of coordinating things from an office. This was an important case. But Peake had been involved in other important cases, and he had never seen any of the agency’s titled officers actually getting their hands dirty. Now he understood: Sharp had chosen to wade into the muddy center of this one because he had discovered that his old enemy, Shadway, was involved, and because only in the field would he have an opportunity to kill Shadway and stage the shooting to look legitimate.
“Way back,” Sharp said, more to himself this time than to Jerry Peake. “Way back.”
The roomy interior of the Mercedes-Benz trunk was warm because it was heated by the sun. But Eric Leben, curled on his side in the darkness, felt another and greater warmth: the peculiar and almost pleasant fire that burned in his blood, flesh, and bones, a fire that seemed to be melting him down into … something other than a man.
The inner and outer heat, the darkness, the motion of the car, and the hypnotic humming of the tires had lulled him into a trancelike state. For a time he had forgotten who he was, where he was, and why he had put himself in this place. Thoughts eddied lazily through his mind, like opalescent films of oil drifting, rippling, intertwining, and forming slow-motion whirlpools on the surface of a lake. At times his thoughts were light and pleasant: the sweet body curves and skin textures of Rachael, Sarah, and other women with whom he had made love; the favorite teddy bear he had slept with as a child; fragments of movies he had seen; lines of favorite songs. But sometimes the mental images grew dark and frightening: Uncle Barry grinning and beckoning; an unknown dead woman in a dumpster; another woman nailed to a wall—naked, dead, staring; the hooded figure of Death looming out of shadows; a deformed face in a mirror; strange and monstrous hands somehow attached to his own wrists …
Once, the car stopped, and the cessation of movement caused him to float up from the trance. He quickly reoriented himself, and that icy reptilian rage flooded back into him. He eagerly flexed and unflexed his strong, elongated, sharp-nailed hands in anticipation of choking the life out of Rachael—she who had denied him, she who had rejected him, she who had sent him into the path of death. He
almost burst out of the trunk, then heard a man’s voice, hesitated. Judging by the bits of inane conversation he was able to overhear, and because of the noise of a gas-pump nozzle being inserted into the fuel tank, Eric realized that Rachael had stopped at a service station, where there were sure to be a few—and perhaps a lot of—people. He had to wait for a better opportunity.
Earlier, back at the cabin, when he had opened the trunk, he had immediately noted that the rear wall was a solid metal panel, making it impossible for him to simply kick the car’s rear seat off its pins and clamber through into the passenger compartment. Furthermore, the latch mechanism was unreachable from within the trunk because of a metal cover plate fastened in place by several Phillips-head screws. Fortunately, Rachael and Shadway had been so busy gathering up the copy of the Wildcard file that Eric had been able to snatch a Phillips screwdriver off the tool rack, remove the latch plate, climb into the trunk, and close the lid. Even in the dark, he could find the bared latch, slip the blade of the screwdriver into the mechanism, and pop it open with no difficulty.
If he heard no voices the next time they stopped, he could be out of the trunk in a couple of seconds, fast enough to get his hands on her before she realized what was happening.
At the service station, as he waited silently and patiently within the trunk, he brought his hands to his face and thought he detected additional changes from those he had seen and felt at the cabin. Likewise, when he explored his neck, shoulders, and most of his body, he did not seem to be formed quite as he should have been.
He thought he felt a patch of … scales.
Revulsion made his teeth chatter.
He quickly stopped examining himself.
He wanted to know what he was becoming.
Yet he didn’t want to know.
He needed to know.