that rot had spread widely through the Thunder Hill staff, and that it
was not ordinary human corruption but the result of an extraordinary and
terrifying infection. Their failure would cost them their lives.
At one-forty-five, Leland and Lieutenant Horner returned to Shenkfield,
leaving the Depository's entire staff locked deep in the bosom of the
earth. Upon his return to his windowless office in that other
underground facility, the colonel received several doses of bad news,
all courtesy of Foster Polnichey, the head of the Chicago office of the
FBI.
First, Sharkle was dead out in Evanston, Illinois, which should have
been good news, but he had taken his sister, brother-in-law, and an
entire SWAT team with him. The siege of Sharkle's house had become
national news due to the extreme violence of its conclusion. The
blood-hungry media would be focused on O'Bannon Lane until endless
rehashing of the story drained it of thrills. Worse, among Sharkle's
mad ravings, there had been enough truth to lead a perceptive and
aggressive reporter to Nevada, to the Tranquility, and perhaps all the
way to Thunder Hill.
Worst of all, Foster Polnichey reported that "something almost . . .
well . . . supernatural is happening here." A stabbing and shooting
in an Uptown apartment, involving a family named Mendoza, had caused
such a sensation within the city's police department that newspaper
reporters and television crews had virtually set siege to the tenement
house hours ago. Evidently, Winton Tolk, the officer whose life had
been saved by Brendan Cronin, had brought a stabbed child back from
near-death.
Incredibly, Brendan Cronin had passed his own amazing talents to Tolk.
But what else had he passed on to the black policeman? There might be
only a wondrous new power in Winton Tolk . . . or something dark and
dangerous, alive and inhuman, living within the cop.
The worst possible scenario was, after all, unfolding. Leland was
half-sick with apprehension as he listened to Polnichey.
According to the FBI agent, Tolk was giving no interviews to the press
and was, in fact, now in seclusion in his own house, where another mob
of reporters had gathered. Sooner or later, however, Tolk would agree
to speak with the press, and he would mention Brendan Cronin, and from
there they would eventually find the link to the Halbourg girl.
The Halbourg girl. That was another nightmare. Upon receiving this
morning's news of Tolk's unexpected healing powers, Polnichey had gone
to the Halbourgs' home to determine if Emmy had acquired unusual powers
subsequent to her own miraculous recovery. What he found there beggared
description, and he immediately isolated the entire Halbourg family from
the press and public before their secret was discovered.
Now all five Halbourgs were in an FBI safe-house, under the watchful
eyes of six agents who'd been informed only that the family was as much
to be feared as protected and that no agent was to be alone with any
member of the family at any time. If the Halbourgs made threatening or
unusual moves, they would all be killed instantly.
"But I think it's all pointless now," Polnichey said on the phone from
Chicago. "I think we've lost control of it. ' It's spread, and we've
no hope of containing it again. So we might as well call an end to the
cover-up, go public."
"Are you mad?" Leland demanded.
"If it's come to the point where we have to kill people, lots of people,
like the Halbourgs and the Tolks and all the witnesses there in Nevada,
in order just to keep the story contained, then the cost of containment
has gotten too damn high."
Leland Falkirk was furious. "You've lost sight of what's at stake here.
My God, man, we're no longer merely trying to keep the news from the
public. That's almost immaterial now. Now, we're trying to protect our
entire species from obliteration. If we go public, and if then we
decide to use violence to contain the infection, every goddamn
politician and bleeding-heart will be second-guessing us, interfering,
and before you know it, we'll have lost the war!"
"But I think what's being proven here is that the danger isn't that
great," Polnichey said. "Sure, I've told the men guarding the Halbourgs
to regard them as a threat, but I don't really believe they're a danger
to us. That little Emmy ... she's a darling, not a monster. I don't
know how the power got in Cronin or how he conveyed it to the girl, but
I'm almost willing to bet my life that the power is the only thing
inside the child. The only thing inside any of them. If you could meet
Emmy and watch her, Colonel! She's a delight. All evidence points to
the fact that we should regard what's happening as the greatest event in
the history of mankind."
"Of course," Leland said coldly, "that's what an enemy like this would
want us to believe. If we can be convinced that accommodation and
surrender are a great blessing, we'll be conquered without a fight."
"But Colonel, if Cronin and Corvaisis and Tolk and Emmy have been
infected, if they're no longer human, or at least no longer like you and
me, they wouldn't advertise by performing miraculous cures and feats of
telekinesis. They'd keep their amazing abilities secret in order to
spread their infection to more people without detection."
Leland was unmoved by that argument. "We don't know exactly how this
thing works. Maybe a person, once infected, surrenders control to the
parasite, becomes a slave. Or to answer the point you've just made,
maybe the relationship between the host and parasite is benign, mutually
supportive-and maybe the host doesn't even know the parasite is inside
him, which would explain why the Halbourg girl and the others don't know
where their power comes from. But in either case, that person is no
longer strictly human. And in my estimation, Polnichey, that person can
no longer be trusted. Not an inch. Now, for God's sake, you've got to
take the entire Tolk family into custody, too. Isolate them at once."
"As I told you, Colonel, journalists surround the Tolk house. If I go in
there with agents and take the Tolks into custody in front of a score of
reporters, our cover-up is blown. And although I no longer believe in
the cover-up, I'm not going to sabotage it. I know my duty."
"You've at least got agents watching the house?"
"Yes."
"What about the Mendozas? If Tolk infected the boy the way Cronin
apparently infected him . . ."
"We're watching the Mendozas," Polnichey said. "Again, we can't make a
bold move because of the reporters."
The other problem was Father Stefan Wycazik. The priest had been to the
Mendozas' apartment and then to the Halbourg house before Foster
Polnichey had known what was going on at either location. Later, an FBI
agent had seen Wycazik at barricades near the Sharkle house in Evanston,
at the very moment when Sharkle had detonated his bomb. But no one knew
where he had gone; no one had seen him in almost six hours. "Obviously
&nbs
p; he's putting it together, piece by piece. One more reason to call off
the cover-up and go public, before we're all caught in the act anyway."
Leland Falkirk suddenly felt that everything was flying apart, out of
control, and he had trouble breathing, for he had dedicated his life to
the philosophy and principles of control, unremitting iron control in
all things. Control was what mattered more than anything else. First
came self-control. You had to learn to exert unfaltering control over
your desires
and ignoble impulses, or otherwise you risked destruction by one vice or
another: alcohol, drugs, sex. He had learned that much from his
ultra-religious parents, who had begun drumming the lesson into him
before he was even old enough to understand what they were saying. And
you also had to control your intellectual processes; you had to force
yourself to rely always on logic and reason, for it was human nature to
drift into superstition, into patterns of behavior based on irrational
assumptions. That was a lesson he had learned in spite of his parents,
from attending Pentecostal services with them and watching in shock and
fear as they fell to the floor of the church or revival tent, where they
screamed and thrashed in wild abandon, transported by what they claimed
was the spirit of God-though it was actually just hysterical Holy
Rollerism. You had to control your fear, too, or you could not hold on
to sanity for long. He had taught himself to conquer his fear of his
parents, who had routinely beat and punished him while claiming it was
for his own good because the devil was in him and must be driven out.
One way of learning to control fear was by subjecting yourself to pain
and thereby increasing your tolerance for it, because you couldn't be
afraid of anything if you were sure you could bear the pain it might
cause you. Control. Leland Falkirk controlled himself, his life, his
men, and any assignment that he was given, but now he felt control of
this situation slipping quickly out of his grasp, and he was closer to
panic than he had been in more than forty years.
"Polnichey," he said, "I'm going to hang up, but you stand by your
phone. My man will set up a scrambled conference call between me, you,
your director, Riddenhour in Washington, and our White House contact.
We're going to agree on a tough policy and the best way of implementing
it. Damned if I'll let you gutless wonders fall apart on this. We'll
keep control. We're going to eradicate the infected people if that's
necessary, even if some of them are cute little girls and priests, and
we're going to save our asses. By God, I'm going to make sure we do!"
When Faye and Ginger returned from Elko at two-forty-five in the motel
van, the green-brown car followed them down the exit ramp from I-80.
Ginger was half-convinced it would swing into the motel lot and park
beside them, but it stopped along the county road, a hundred feet short
of the Tranquility, and waited in the slanting snowfall.
Faye parked in front of the motel office door, and Dom and Ernie came
out to help them unload the purchases they had made in Elko: ski suits,
ski masks, boots, and insulated gloves for those who didn't already have
them, based on sizes everyone had provided last night; two new
semiautomatic .20gauge shotguns; ammunition for those weapons and the
others; backpacks, flashlights, two compasses, a small acetylene torch
with two bottles of gas, and a number of other items;
Ernie embraced Faye, and Dom embraced Ginger. Simultaneously, both men
said, "I was worried about you."
And Ginger heard herself saying, "I was worried about you, too," even as
Faye said it. Ernie and Faye kissed. With snowflakes frosting his
eyebrows and melting into jeweled beads of water on his lashes, Dom
lowered his face to Ginger's, and they kissed, too-a sweet, warm,
lingering kiss. Somehow, it was as right for her and Dom to greet each
other in such a fashion as it was for Faye and Ernie, husband and wife.
That rightness was part of everything Ginger had felt for him since
arriving in Elko two days ago.
When everything had been unloaded from the van and stashed in the
Blocks' apartment, all ten members of the Tranquility family adjourned
to the diner. Jack, Ernie, Dom, Ned, and Faye brought guns.
As she pulled some chairs up to the table where Brendan and Dom had
tested their powers last night, Ginger noticed that the priest regarded
the weapons with a mixture of displeasure and fear, that he seemed far
less optimistic than yesterday, when his discovery of his amazing gift
had sent his spirit soaring. "No dream last night," he explained when
she asked the reason for his grim mood. "No golden light, no voice
calling to me. You know, Ginger, I told myself all along that I didn't
believe I was being called here by God. But deep down that is what I
believed. Father Wycazik was right: There was always a core of faith in
me. Recently, I've been edging back to an acceptance of God. Not only
acceptance: I need Him again. But now . . . no dream, no golden
light ... as if God's abandoned me."
"No, you're wrong," Ginger said, taking his hand as if she could absorb
his distress by osmosis and leave him feeling
better. "If you believe in God, He never abandons you. Right?
You can abandon God, but never the other way around. He always
forgives, always loves. Isn't that what you tell a parishioner?"
Brendan smiled wanly. "Sounds like you went to seminary."
She said, "The dream was probably just a memory surging against the
block that's holding it down in your subconscious. But if it was really
God summoning you here ... well, the reason you no longer have the
dream is because you've arrived. You've come as He wanted, so there's
no need for Him to send you the dream any more. See?"
The priest's face brightened a little.
They took up seats around the table.
With dismay, Ginger saw that Marcie's condition had worsened since last
night. The girl sat with her head bent, face half-hidden by her thick
black hair staring at her tiny hands, which lay limply in her lap. She
mumbled: "Moon, moon, the moon, moon......... She was in all-out
pursuit of those memories of July 6, which remained teasingly on the
edge of her awareness and which, by their tantalizing inaccessibility,
had drawn her into obsessive contemplation of their halfglimpsed forms.
"She'll come out of it," Ginger told Jorja, knowing how empty and
foolish the statement was, yet unable to think of anything else to say.
"Yes," Jorja said, apparently not finding it empty or foolish but
reassuring. "She has to come out of it. She has to."
Jack and Ned stood the plywood panel against the door and braced it with
a table again, assuring freedom from eavesdroppers.
Quickly, Faye and Ginger told of their visit to the Jamisons' ranch and
of being followed by the two men in the Plymouth. Ernie and Dom had been
followed, too.
This news made Jack edgy. "If they're coming out in the open to keep
tabs on us, that means
they're almost ready to grab us again."
Ned Sarver said, "Maybe I'd just better stand watch, make sure nobody's
moving in on us already." Jack agreed, and Ned went to the door and put
one eye against the narrow crack between the plywood and the door frame,
looking out at the snow-swept parking lot.
At Jack's request, Dom and Ernie explained what they had found on their
tour of the Thunder Hill Depository's perimeter fence.
Jack listened carefully, asking a number of questions for which Ginger
could not always discern the purpose. Were any thin bare wires woven
through the chainlink fence? What were the fenceposts like? Finally,
he asked, "No guard dogs or men on patrol?"
Dom said, "No. There'd have been prints in the snow along the fence.
Must be heavy electronic security. I'd hoped we'd be able to get on the
grounds-but not after I got a close-up view of the place."
"Oh, we'll get on the grounds all right," Jack said. "The tricky part
will be getting inside the Depository itself."
Dom and Ernie looked at him with such astonishment that Ginger knew
Thunder Hill must have looked formidable, indeed.
"Get inside?" Dom said.
"No can do," Ernie said.
"If they rely on multiple electronic systems for the perimeter
security," Jack said, "they'll very likely also rely on electronics at
the main entrance. That's the way it is these days. Everyone's dazzled
by high-tech. Oh, sure, Thunder Hill will have a guard at the front
gate, but he'll be so used to depending on computers, video cameras, and
other gadgets that he'll be lax. So we might be able to surprise him,
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 80