The Husband

by Dean Koontz

  Holly came on the line. “Are you okay, Mitch?”

  “I’m all right. I’m going crazy, but I’m all right. I love you.”

  “I’m okay, too. I haven’t been hurt. Not really.”

  “We’re going to pull this off,” he assured her. “I’m not going to let you down.”

  “I never thought you would. Never.”

  “I love you, Holly.”

  “He wants the phone back,” she said, and returned it to her captor.

  She had sounded constrained. Twice he’d told her that he loved her, but she had not responded in kind. Something was wrong.

  The gentle voice returned: “There’s been one change in the plan, Mitch, one important change. Instead of a wire transfer, cash is king.”

  Mitch had worried that he would not be able to talk them out of having the ransom sent by wire. He should have been relieved by this development. Instead it troubled him. It was another indication that something had happened to put the kidnappers off their game. A new voice on the phone, then Holly sounding guarded, and now a sudden preference for cash.

  “Are you with me, Mitch?”

  “Yeah. It’s just, you’ve thrown me a curve here. You should know…Anson hasn’t been as full of brotherly concern as maybe you thought he would be.”

  The caller was amused. “The others thought he would be. I was never sure. I don’t expect genuine tears from a crocodile.”

  “I’m handling the situation,” Mitch assured him.

  “Have you been surprised by your brother?”

  “Repeatedly. Listen, right now I can guarantee eight hundred thousand in cash and six hundred thousand in bearer bonds.”

  Before Mitch could mention the additional four hundred thousand that was supposedly aboard Anson’s boat, the kidnapper said, “That’s a disappointment, of course. That other six hundred thousand would buy a lot of time to seek.”

  Mitch didn’t catch the last word. “To what?”

  “Do you seek, Mitch?”

  “Seek what?”

  “If we knew the answer, there’d be no need to seek. A million four will be all right. I’ll think of it as a discount for paying cash.”

  Surprised by the ease with which the lower figure had been accepted, Mitch said, “You can speak for everyone, your partners?”

  “Yes. If I don’t speak for them, who will?”

  “Then…what’s next?”

  “You come alone.”

  “All right.”

  “Unarmed.”

  “All right.”

  “Pack the money and bonds in a plastic trash bag.

  Don’t tie the top shut. Are you familiar with the Turnbridge house?”

  “Everyone in the county knows the Turnbridge house.”

  “Come there at three o’clock. Don’t get cute and think you can come early and lie in wait. All you’ll get for that is a dead wife.”

  “I’ll be there at three. Not a minute earlier. How do I get in?”

  “The gate will appear to be chained, but the chain will be loose. After you drive onto the site, replace the chain as it was. What will you be driving?”

  “My Honda.”

  “Stop directly in front of the house. You’ll see an SUV. Park well away from it. Park with the back of the Honda toward the house and open the trunk. I want to see no one’s in the trunk.”

  “All right.”

  “At that point, I’ll phone you on your cell with instructions.”

  “Wait. My cell. It’s dead.” Actually it was somewhere in Rancho Santa Fe. “Can I use Anson’s?”

  “What’s that number?”

  Anson’s cell phone lay on the kitchen table, beside the money and the bonds. Mitch snared it. “I don’t know the number. I have to switch it on and look. Give me a minute.”

  As Mitch waited for the phone company logo to leave the screen, the man with the gentle voice said, “Tell me, is Anson alive?”

  Surprised by the question, Mitch said only, “Yes.”

  Amused, the caller said, “The simple answer tells me so much.”

  “What does it tell you?”

  “He underestimated you.”

  “You’re reading too much into one word. Here’s the cell number.”

  After Mitch read the number and then repeated it, the man on the phone said, “We want a smooth simple trade, Mitch. The best piece of business is one from which everyone walks away a winner.”

  Mitch considered that this was the first time the man with the gentle voice had said we instead of I.

  “Three o’clock,” the caller reminded him, and hung up.

  50

  Everything in the laundry room was white, everything except the red chair and Anson in it and the small yellow puddle.

  Reeking, restless, rocking side to side on the chair, Anson was resigned to cooperation. “Yeah, there’s one of them talks like that. Name’s Jimmy Null. He’s a pro, but he’s not a front guy. If he’s on the phone with you, the others are dead.”

  “Dead how?”

  “Something went wrong, a disagreement about something, and he decided to bag the whole payoff.”

  “So you think there’s just one of them now?”

  “That makes it harder for you, not easier.”

  “Why harder?”

  “Once he’s wasted the others, his tendency will be to clean up totally behind himself.”

  “Holly and me.”

  “Only when he’s got the money.” In his misery, Anson found a ghastly smile. “You want to know about the money, bro? You want to know what I do for a living?”

  Anson would be offering this information only if he believed that the knowledge would do his brother harm.

  Mitch knew that the glint of vicious glee in Anson’s eyes was an argument for continued ignorance, but his curiosity outweighed his caution.

  Before either of them could speak, the telephone rang.

  Mitch returned to the kitchen, briefly considered not answering, but worried that it might be Jimmy Null calling with additional instructions.

  “Hello?”

  “Anson?”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Who’s this?”

  The voice didn’t belong to Jimmy Null.

  “I’m a friend of Anson’s,” Mitch said.

  Now that he’d taken the call, the best thing was to carry through with it as if all were normal here.

  “When will he be back?” the caller asked.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Should I try his cell?”

  The voice teased Mitch’s memory.

  Picking up Anson’s cell phone from the counter, Mitch said, “He forgot to take it with him.”

  “Can you give him a message?”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “Tell him that Julian Campbell called.”

  The glimmer of the gray eyes, the glitter of the gold Rolex.

  “Anything else?” Mitch asked.

  “That’s everything. Although I do have one concern, friend of Anson.”

  Mitch said nothing.

  “Friend of Anson, are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope you’re taking good care of my Chrysler Windsor. I love that car. See you later.”

  51

  Mitch located the kitchen drawer in which Anson kept two boxes of plastic trash-can liners. He chose the smaller of the sizes, a white thirteen-gallon bag.

  He put the blocks of cash and the envelope of bearer bonds in the bag. He twisted the top but didn’t tie a knot.

  At this hour, in the usual traffic, Rancho Santa Fe was as much as two hours from Corona del Mar. Even if Campbell had associates at work here in Orange County, they wouldn’t arrive immediately.

  When Mitch returned to the laundry room, Anson said, “Who called?”

  “He was selling something.”

  Sea-green and bloodshot, Anson’s eyes were oceans murky with shark’s work. “It didn’t sound like sales.”

 
; “You were going to tell me what you do for a living.”

  Malicious glee swam into Anson’s eyes again. He wanted to share his triumph less out of pride than because somehow it was knowledge that would wound Mitch.

  “Imagine you send data to a customer over the Internet, and on receipt it appears to be innocent material—say photos and a text history of Ireland.”

  “Appears to be.”

  “It’s not like encrypted data, which is meaningless if you don’t have the code. Instead it appears clear, unremarkable. But when you process it with a special software, the photos and text combine and re-form into completely different material, into the hidden truth.”

  “What is the truth?”

  “Wait. First…your customer downloads the software and never has a hard copy. If police search his computer and try to copy or analyze the operative software, the program self-destructs beyond reconstitution. Likewise documents stored on the computer in either original or converted form.”

  Having striven to keep his computer knowledge to the minimum that the modern world would allow, Mitch wasn’t sure that he saw the most useful applications of this, but one occurred to him.

  “So terrorists could communicate over the Internet, and anyone sampling their transmissions would find them sharing only a history of Ireland.”

  “Or France or Tahiti, or long analyses of John Wayne’s films. No sinister material, no obvious encryption to raise suspicion. But terrorists aren’t a stable, profitable market.”

  “Who is?”

  “There are many. But I want you to know especially about the work I did for Julian Campbell.”

  “The entertainment entrepreneur,” Mitch said.

  “It’s true he owns casinos in several countries. Partly he uses them to launder money from other activities.”

  Mitch thought he knew the real Anson, a man far different from the one who had ridden south with him to Rancho Santa Fe. No more illusions. No more self-imposed blindness.

  Yet in this essential moment, a chilling third iteration of the man revealed itself, almost as much a stranger to Mitch as had been the second Anson who first appeared in Campbell’s library.

  His face seemed to acquire a new tenant that slouched through the chambers of his skull and brought a darker light to those two familiar green windows.

  Something about his body changed, as well. A more primitive hulk seemed to occupy the chair than he who’d sat there a minute previous, still a man but a man in whom the animal was more clearly visible.

  This awareness came to Mitch before his brother had begun to reveal the business done with Campbell. He could not pretend that the effect was psychological, that Anson’s revelation had transformed him in Mitch’s eyes, for the change preceded the disclosure.

  “One-half of one percent of men are pedophiles,” Anson said. “In the U.S.—one and a half million. And millions of others worldwide.”

  In this bright white room, Mitch felt on the threshold of a darkness, a terrible gate opening before him, and no turning back.

  “Pedophiles are eager consumers of child pornography,” Anson continued. “Though they might be buying it through a police sting operation that will destroy them, they risk everything to get it.”

  Who did Hitler’s work, Stalin’s, Mao Tse-tung’s? Neighbors did the work, friends, mothers and fathers did the work, and brothers.

  “If the stuff comes in the form of dull text about the history of British theater and converts into exciting pictures and even video, if they can get their need filled safely, their appetite becomes insatiable.”

  Mitch had left the pistol on the kitchen table. Perhaps he had unconsciously suspected some outrage like this and had not trusted himself with the weapon.

  “Campbell has two hundred thousand customers. In two years, he expects a million worldwide, and revenues of five billion dollars.”

  Mitch remembered the scrambled eggs and toast he had made in this creature’s kitchen, and his stomach curdled at the thought of having eaten off plates, with utensils, that those hands had touched.

  “Profit on gross sales is sixty percent. The adult performers do it for the fun. The young stars aren’t paid. What do they need with money at their age? And I’ve got a little piece of Julian’s business. I told you I have eight million, but it’s three times that much.”

  The laundry room was intolerably crowded. Mitch sensed that in addition to him and his brother, unseen legions were attendant.

  “Bro, I just wanted you to understand how filthy the money is that’s going to buy Holly. The rest of your life, when you kiss her, touch her, you’re going to think about the source of all that dirty, dirty money.”

  Chained helpless to the chair, sitting in urine, soaked in the fear sweat that earlier the darkness had wrung from him, Anson raised his head defiantly and thrust out his chest, and his eyes shone with triumph, as though having done what he had done, having facilitated Campbell’s vile enterprise, was payment enough, that having had the opportunity to serve the appetite of the depraved at the expense of the innocent was all the reward he would need to sustain him through his current humiliation and through the personal ruination to come.

  Some might call this madness, but Mitch knew its real name.

  “I’m leaving,” he announced, for there was nothing else to be said that would matter.

  “Taser me,” Anson demanded, as if to assert that Mitch did not have the power to hurt him in any lasting way.

  “The deal we made?” Mitch said. “Screw it.”

  He switched out the lights and pulled shut the door. Because there are forces against which it is wise to take extra—and even irrational—precautions, he wedged the door shut with a chair. He might have nailed it shut, as well, if he’d had time.

  He wondered if he would ever feel clean again.

  A fit of the shakes took him. He felt as if he would be sick.

  At the sink, he splashed cold water in his face.

  The doorbell rang.

  52

  The chimes played a few bars of “Ode to Joy.” Only minutes had passed since Julian Campbell terminated their phone call. Five billion a year in revenues was a treasure that he would do anything to protect, but he couldn’t have gotten a fresh pair of gunmen to Anson’s place this quickly.

  Mitch cranked off the water at the sink and, face dripping, tried to think if there was any reason he should risk checking on the identity of the visitor through a living-room window. His imagination failed him.

  Time to get out of here.

  He grabbed the trash bag that held the ransom and plucked the pistol off the table. He headed for the back door.

  The Taser. He had left it on a counter by the ovens. He returned for it.

  Again the unknown visitor rang the bell.

  “Who’s that?” Anson asked from the laundry room.

  “The postman. Now shut up.”

  Nearing the back door once more, Mitch remembered his brother’s cell phone. It had been on the table beside the ransom, yet he had grabbed the bag and left the phone.

  Julian Campbell’s call, Anson’s hideous revelations, and the doorbell, coming one on the heels of the other, had rocked him off balance.

  After retrieving the cell phone, Mitch turned in a circle, surveying the kitchen. As far as he could tell, he had forgotten nothing else.

  He turned off the lights, stepped out of the house, and locked the door behind him.

  The inexhaustible wind played chase-and-hide with itself among the ferns and bamboo. Leathery, wind-seared banyan leaves, blown in from another property, scrabbled this way and that across the patio, scratching at the bricks.

  Mitch went to the first of the two garages, entering by the courtyard door. Here his Honda waited, and John Knox ripened in the back of the Buick Super Woody Wagon.

  He’d had a vague plan for hanging Knox’s death around Anson’s neck at the same time that he extricated himself from the setup for Daniel’s and Kathy’s murders.
But Campbell’s looming reentry into the situation left him feeling that he was roller-skating on ice, and the vague plan was now no plan at all.

  None of that mattered at the moment anyway. When Holly was safe, John Knox and the bodies in the learning room and Anson handcuffed to the chair would matter again, and matter big-time, but now they were incidental to the main problem.

  More than two and a half hours remained before he could swap the money for Holly. He opened the trunk of the Honda and tucked the bag into the wheel well.

  In the front seat of the Woody, he found a garage-door remote. He clipped it to the Honda’s sun visor, so he could close the roll-up door from the alleyway.

  He put the pistol and the Taser in the storage pocket in the driver’s door. Sitting behind the steering wheel, he could look down and see the weapons, and they were easier to reach than they would have been under the seat.

  Triggering the remote control, he watched in the rearview mirror as the big door rolled up.

  Backing out of the garage, he glanced to his right, saw the alleyway was clear—and stamped on the brakes in surprise as someone rapped on the driver’s-door window. Snapping his head to the left, he discovered that he was face-to-face with Detective Taggart.