by Dean Koontz
Jessica met them at the door, hugged Harris fiercely, and wept against his shoulder. To have held her any tighter, he would have had to hurt her. She, the girls, his brother, and his sister-in-law were all that he had now. He was not merely without possessions but without his once strong belief in the system of law and justice that had inspired and sustained him during his entire adult life. From that moment on, he would trust in nothing except himself and the few people who were closest to him. Security, if it existed at all, could not be bought, but was a gift to be given only by family and friends.
Bonnie had taken Ondine and Willa to the mall to buy some new clothes for them.
“I should’ve gone along, but I just couldn’t,” Jessica said, wiping at the tears in the corners of her eyes. She seemed fragile in a way she had never been before. “I’m still…I’m shaking from all this. Harris, when they came on Saturday with…with the seizure notice, when they made us move out, we were only allowed to take one suitcase each, clothes and personal stuff, no jewelry, no…no anything.”
“It’s an outrageous abuse of legal process,” Darius said angrily and with palpable frustration.
“And they stood over us, watching what we packed,” Jessica told Harris. “Those men…just standing there, while the girls opened dresser drawers to get their underwear, bras…” That memory brought a snarl of outrage to her voice and, for the time being, chased off the emotional fragility that dismayed Harris and that was so unlike her. “It was disgusting! They were so arrogant, such bastards about it. I was just waiting for one of the sonsofbitches to touch me, to try to hurry me along with a little hand on the arm, anything like that, because I’d have kicked him in the balls so hard he’d have been wearing dresses and high heels the rest of his life.”
He was surprised to hear himself laugh.
Darius laughed too.
Jessica said, “Well, I would have.”
“I know,” Harris said. “I know you would.”
“I don’t see what’s so funny.”
“I don’t either, honey, but it is.”
“Maybe you’ve got to have balls to see the humor,” Darius said.
That made Harris laugh again.
Shaking her head in amazement at the inexplicable behavior of men in general and these two in particular, Jessica went to the kitchen, where she was preparing the ingredients for a pair of her justly renowned walnut-apple pies. They followed her.
Harris watched her peel an apple. Her hands were trembling.
He said, “Shouldn’t the girls be in school? They can wait till the weekend to buy clothes.”
Jessica and Darius exchanged a look, and Darius said, “We all felt it was better they stay out of school for a week. Until the press coverage isn’t so…fresh.”
That was something Harris hadn’t really thought about: his name and photograph in the newspapers, headlines about a drug-dealing cop, the television anchorpersons conducting their happy talk around lurid accounts of his alleged secret life of crime. Ondine and Willa would have to endure heavy humiliation whenever they returned to school, whether it was tomorrow or next week or a month from now. Hey, can your dad sell me an ounce of pure white? How much does your old man charge to fix a speeding ticket? Does your daddy just deal in drugs, or can he get a hooker for me? Dear God. This wound was separate from all others.
Whoever his mysterious enemies were, whoever had done this to him, they must have been aware that they were destroying not only him but his family as well. Though Harris knew nothing else about them, he knew they were utterly without pity and as merciless as snakes.
From the wall phone in the kitchen, he made a call that he had been dreading—to Carl Falkenberg, his boss at Parker Center. He was prepared to use accumulated personal days and vacation, in order not to return to work for three weeks, in the hope that the conspiracy against him would miraculously collapse during that time. But, as he had feared, they were suspending him from duty indefinitely, although with pay. Carl was supportive but uncharacteristically reserved, as if he were responding to every question by reading from a carefully worded selection of answers. Even if the charges against Harris were eventually dropped or if a trial resulted in a verdict of innocence, there would be a parallel investigation by the LAPD Internal Affairs Division, and if its findings discredited him, he would be discharged from duty regardless of the outcome in federal court. Consequently, Carl was keeping a safe professional distance.
Harris hung up, sat at the kitchen table, and quietly conveyed the essence of the conversation to Jessica and Darius. He was aware of an unnerving hollowness in his voice, but he couldn’t get rid of it.
“At least it’s suspension with pay,” Jessica said.
“They have to keep paying me or get in trouble with the union,” Harris explained. “It’s no gift.”
Darius brewed a pot of coffee, and while Jessica continued with her pie-making, he and Harris remained in the kitchen, so the three of them could discuss legal options and strategies. Although the situation was grim, it felt good to be talking about taking action, striking back.
But the hits just kept on coming.
Not even half an hour passed before Carl Falkenberg called to inform Harris that the Internal Revenue Service had served the LAPD with a legal order to garnishee his wages against “possible unpaid taxes from trafficking in illegal drugs.” Although his suspension was with pay, his weekly salary would have to be held in trust until the issue of his guilt or innocence was determined in court.
Walking back to the table and sitting opposite his brother again, Harris told them the latest. His voice was now as flat and emotionless as that of a talking machine.
Darius exploded off his chair, furious. “Damn it, this is not right, this does not wash, no way, I’ll be damned if it does! Nobody has proved anything. We’ll get this garnishment withdrawn. We’ll start on it right now. It might take a few days, but we’ll make them eat that piece of paper, Harris, I swear to you that we’ll make the bastards eat it.” He hurried out of the kitchen, evidently to his study and the telephone there.
For a long spiral of seconds, Harris and Jessica stared at each other. Neither of them spoke. They had been married so long that sometimes they didn’t have to speak to know what they would have said to each other.
She returned her attention to the dough in the pie pan, which she had been crimping along the edge with her thumb and forefinger. Ever since Harris had come home, Jessica’s hands had been trembling noticeably. Now the tremors were gone. Her hands were steady. He had the terrible feeling that her steadiness was the result of a bleak resignation to the unbeatable superiority of the unknown forces arrayed against them.
He looked out the window beside the table. Sunshine streamed through ficus branches. The flowers in the beds of English primrose were almost Day-Glo bright. The backyard was expansive, well and lushly landscaped, with a swimming pool in the center of a used-brick patio. To every dreamer living in deprivation, that backyard was a perfect symbol of success. A highly motivating image. But Harris Descoteaux knew what it really was. Just another room in the prison.
While the JetRanger flew due north, Ellie sat in one of the two seats in the last row of the passenger cabin. She held the open attaché case on her lap and worked with the computer that was built into it.
She was still marveling over her good fortune. When she had first boarded the chopper and had searched the cabin to be sure no agency men were hiding there, before they had even taken off, she had discovered the computer on the deck at the end of the aisle. She recognized it immediately as hardware developed for the agency, because she’d actually looked over Danny’s shoulder when he had been designing some of the critical software for it. She realized that it was plugged in and on-line, but she was too busy to check it out closely until after they got off the ground and disabled the second JetRanger. Safely in the air, northbound toward Salt Lake City, she returned to the computer and was astonished when she realized that the image
on the display screen was the satellite look-down of the very shopping center from which they had just escaped. If the agency had temporarily hijacked Earthguard 3 from the EPA to search for her and Spencer, they could only have done so through their omnipotent home-office computer system in Virginia. Mama. Only Mama had such power. The workstation that had been abandoned in the chopper was on-line with Mama, the megabitch herself.
If she had found the computer unplugged, she wouldn’t have been able to get into Mama. A thumbprint was required to get on-line. Danny hadn’t designed the software, but he had seen a demonstration of it and had told her about it, as excited as a child who had been shown one of the best toys ever. Because her thumbprint was not one of the approved, the hardware would have been useless to her.
Spencer came back down the aisle, with Rocky padding along behind him, and Ellie glanced up from the VDT in surprise. “Shouldn’t you be keeping a gun on the crew?”
“I took their headsets away from them, so they can’t use the radio. They don’t have any weapons up there, and even if they had an arsenal, they might not use it. They’re flyboys, not murderous thugs. But they think we are murderous thugs, insane murderous thugs, and they’re nicely respectful.”
“Yeah, well, they also know we need them to fly this crate.”
As Ellie returned to her work on the computer, Spencer picked up the cellular phone that someone had abandoned on the last seat in the port-side row. He sat across the aisle from her.
“Well, see,” he said, “they think I can fly this eggbeater if anything happens to them.”
“Can you?” she asked, without shifting her attention from the video display, keeping her fingers busy on the keys.
“No. But when I was a Ranger, I learned a lot about choppers—mostly related to how you sabotage them, boobytrap them, and blow them up. I recognize all the flight instruments, know the names of them. I was real convincing. Fact is, they probably think the only reason I haven’t already killed them is because I don’t want to have to haul their bodies out of the cockpit and sit in their blood.”
“What if they lock the cockpit door?”
“I broke the lock. And they don’t have anything in there to wedge the door shut with.”
She said, “You’re pretty good at this.”
“Aw, shucks, not really. What’ve you got there?”
While Ellie worked, she told him about their good fortune.
“Everything’s coming up roses,” he said with only a half-note of sarcasm. “What’re you doing?”
“Through Mama, I’ve up-linked to Earthguard, the EPA satellite they’ve been using to track us. I’ve gotten into the core of its operating program. All the way to the program-management level.”
He whistled in appreciation. “Look, even Mr. Rocky Dog is impressed.”
She glanced up and saw that Rocky was grinning. His tail swished back and forth on the deck, thumping into the seats on both sides of the aisle.
“You’re going to screw up a hundred-million-dollar satellite, turn it into space junk?” Spencer asked.
“Only for a while. Freeze it up for six hours. By then they won’t have a clue where to look for us.”
“Ah, go ahead, have fun, screw it up permanently.”
“When the agency isn’t using it for crap like this, it might actually do some beneficial work.”
“So you’re a civic-minded individual after all.”
“Well, I was a Girl Scout once. It gets in your blood, like a disease.”
“Then you probably wouldn’t want to go out with me tonight, spraypaint some graffiti on highway overpasses.”
“There!” she said, and tapped the ENTER key. She studied the data that came up on the screen and smiled. “Earthguard just shut down for a six-hour nap. They’ve lost us—except for radar tracking. Are you sure we’re keeping due north and high enough for radar to pick us up, like I asked?”
“The boys up front promised me.”
“Perfect.”
“What did you do before all this?” he asked.
“Freelance software designer, specializing in video games.”
“You created video games?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, of course, you did.”
“I’m serious. I did.”
“No, you missed my inflection,” he said. “I meant, of course you did. It’s obvious. And now you’re in a real-life video game.”
“The way the world’s going, everyone’ll be living in one big video game eventually, and it’s sure as hell not going to be a nice one, not ‘Super Mario Brothers’ or anything that gentle. More like ‘Mortal Kombat.’”
“Now that you’ve disabled a hundred-million-dollar satellite, what next?”
As they had talked, Ellie had been focused on the VDT. She had retreated from Earthguard, back into Mama. She was calling up menus, one after the other, speed-reading them. “I’m looking around, seeing what’s the best damage I can do.”
“Mind doing something for me first?”
“Tell me what, while I nose around here.”
He told her about the trap that he had set for anyone who might break into his cabin while he was gone.
It was her turn to whistle appreciatively. “God, I’d like to’ve seen their faces when they figured out what was going down. And what happened to the digitized photographs when they left Malibu?”
“They were transmitted to the Pacific Bell central computer, preceded by a code that activated a program I’d previously designed and secretly buried there. That program allowed them to be received and then retransmitted to the Illinois Bell central computer, where I buried another little hidden program that came to life in response to the special access code, and it received them from Pacific Bell.”
“You think the agency didn’t track them that far?”
“Well, to Pacific Bell, sure. But after my little program sent them to Chicago, it erased all record of that call. Then it self-destructed.”
“Sometimes a self-destruct can be rebuilt and examined. Then they’d see the instructions about erasing the call to Illinois Bell.”
“Not in this case. This was a beautiful little self-destructed program that stayed beautifully self-destructed, I guarantee you. When it dismantled itself, it also took out a reasonably large block of the Pacific Bell system.”
Ellie interrupted her urgent search of Mama’s programs to look at him. “How large is reasonably large?”
“About thirty thousand people must’ve been without telephone service for two to three hours before they got backup systems on-line.”
“You were never a Girl Scout,” she said.
“Well, I was never given a chance.”
“You learned a lot in that computer-crime task force.”
“I was a diligent employee,” he admitted.
“More than you learned about helicopters, for sure. So you think those photos are still waiting in the Chicago Bell computer?”
“I’ll walk you through the routine, and we’ll find out. Might be useful to get a good look at the faces of some of these thugs—for future reference. Don’t you think?”
“I think. Tell me what to do.”
Three minutes later, the first of the photographs appeared on the video display of the computer in her lap. Spencer leaned across the narrow aisle from his seat, and she angled the attaché case so they both could see the screen.
“That’s my living room,” he said.
“You’re not deeply interested in decor, are you?”
“My favorite period style is Early Neat.”
“More like Late Monastery.”
Two men in riot gear were moving through the room quickly enough to be blurred in the still shot.
“Hit the space bar,” Spencer said.
She hit the bar, and the next photograph appeared on the screen. They went through the first ten shots in less than a minute. A few provided a clear image of a face or two. But it was difficult to get a sense of what
a man looked like when he was wearing a riot helmet with a chin strap.
“Just shuffle through them until we see something new,” he said.
Ellie rapidly, repeatedly tapped the space bar, flipping through the photos, until they came to shot number thirty-one. A new man appeared, and he was not in riot gear.
“Sonofabitch,” Spencer said.
“I think so,” she agreed.
“Let’s see thirty-two.”
She tapped the space bar.
“Well.”
“Yeah.”
“Thirty-three.”
Tap.
“No doubt about it,” she said.
Tap. Thirty-four.
Tap. Thirty-five.
Tap. Thirty-six.
The same man was in shot after shot, moving around the living room of the cabin in Malibu. And he was the last of the five men they had seen getting out of this very helicopter in front of the Hallmark card store a short while ago.
“Weirdest thing of all,” Ellie said, “I’ll bet we’re looking at his picture on his computer.”
“You’re probably sitting in his seat.”
“In his helicopter.”
Spencer said, “My God, he must be pissed.”
Quickly they went through the rest of the photographs. That pudgy-faced, rather jolly-looking fellow was in every shot until he apparently spit on a piece of paper and pasted it to the camera lens.
“I won’t forget what he looks like,” Spencer said, “but I wish we had a printer, could get a copy of that.”
“There’s a printer built in,” she said, indicating a slot on the side of the attaché case. “I think there’s a supply of maybe fifty sheets of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven bond paper. I sort of remember that’s what Danny told me about it.”
“All I need is one.”
“Two. One for me.”
They picked the clearest shot of their benign-looking enemy, and Ellie printed out twice.