by Dean Koontz
She frowned. “It’s not so simple, is it?”
“If we go to any cops now, we’ll be dead by morning. These people, whoever they are, have been hiding something big for a long time. Now the cover-up isn’t working any more. The whole thing’s falling apart. And they know it. That’s why they killed the senator—they’ve finally decided to clean up the mess before anyone notices it. Right now they’re probably looking for us. Whatever immunity you might have had is gone—gone with your father. If we go public with the case now, we’ll just be targets. Until we’ve got the entire story, until we understand the why of it, until we can blow them out of the water, we’ll stay alive only as long as we stay out of sight.”
Joanna seized on that. “But we’ll be extremely visible if we go hunting Rotenhausen in Switzerland.”
“We won’t blunder straight over there. We’ll be discreet.”
She wasn’t impressed. “The senator tried to sneak into London. It didn’t work for him.”
“It’ll work for us. It has to.”
“But even if it does—what’ll we do after we get to Saint Moritz?”
He sipped his tea and thought about her question. Finally he said, “I’ll find Rotenhausen’s place, look it over. If it isn’t too heavily guarded, I’ll get in, find his file room. If he’s the careful, methodical man of science he seems to be, maybe he’ll have a record of what he did to you, how he did it, and why.”
“What about British-Continental Insurance?”
“What about it?”
“If we follow up on that lead, maybe we won’t have to go to Saint Moritz.”
“Now that we know where they put you through this ’treatment,’ we don’t have to pry into British-Continental. Besides, that would be just as dangerous as going to Switzerland, but we wouldn’t be likely to find as much there as at Rotenhausen’s place.”
She slumped back in her chair, resigned to the trip. “When do we leave London?”
“As soon as possible. Within the hour, if we can manage it.”
53
When Alex and Joanna returned to the hotel for their passports and luggage, they didn’t go to their suite alone. They stopped at the front desk, ordered a rental car, told the clerk that they were checking out sooner than originally anticipated, and took two bellmen upstairs with them.
Although the bellmen served as unwitting guards, and though the senator’s killers were not likely to strike in front of witnesses, Alex paced nervously in the drawing room and watched the door, alert for the silent turning of the knob, while Joanna got their bags ready to go. Fortunately, when they had arrived the previous night from Tokyo, they had been too tired to unpack more than essentials; and this morning, awakened by Tom Chelgrin’s noisy messenger, they’d had no time to hang up their clothes and transfer their things from the suitcases to the dresser drawers, so repacking only required a couple of minutes.
On the way downstairs, the elevator stopped to take aboard more people at the tenth floor. As the doors slid open, Alex unhooked one button on his overcoat, reached inside, and put his hand on the butt of the pistol tucked under the waistband of his trousers. He was half convinced that the people waiting in the corridor were not merely other hotel guests, that they would have submachine guns and would spray the elevator with bullets. The doors rolled open. An elderly couple entered the cab, conducting an animated discussion in rapid-fire Spanish, hardly aware of their fellow passengers.
Joanna smiled grimly at Alex. She knew what he’d been thinking.
He took his hand off the 9mm automatic and buttoned his coat.
They had to wait in the lobby fifteen minutes for the rental car to arrive, but by a quarter past three, they drove away into rain so silver that it appeared to be sleet. Gray mist as thick as smoke settled lower with the waning of the day, engulfing the tops of the tallest buildings, and in the strange pewter light, London seemed medieval even where the buildings were all of glass and steel and modern angles.
For a while they weaved through a Byzantine complexity of rain-lashed streets that branched off from one another with no discernible logic. They were lost but didn’t care, because until they identified their tail and lost it, they had no specific destination.
Turned in her seat, staring out the back window, Joanna said at last, “Another Jaguar. A yellow one this time.”
“All these bastards seem to travel in style.”
“Well, they knew the senator,” Joanna said sarcastically, facing forward and engaging her seat belt, “and the senator always moved in the very best circles, didn’t he?”
Alex swerved right, in front of a bus and into thinner traffic. The tires squealed, the car shot forward, and he whipped from lane to lane, as if trying to make a car do what an Olympic skier could accomplish in a giant slalom. Motorists braked in surprise as the rental car swerved around and flashed past them, a truck driver blew his horn angrily, and pedestrians stopped and pointed. But the clog of London traffic didn’t permit a protracted car chase like those in the movies, and the lanes ahead quickly began to jam up. Alex hung a hard left at the first corner and darted in front of a taxi with only centimeters to spare. At midblock he swung the wrong way into a one-way backstreet and stomped the accelerator. Building walls flashed past in a stony blur, two feet away on either side. The small car bounced and shimmied on the rough cobblestones, severely testing Alex’s grip on the steering wheel. If anyone entered the alleyway ahead of them, a head-on crash couldn’t be averted; but luck was with them, and they exploded out of the cramped street onto a main thoroughfare, fishtailing across the wet pavement in front of oncoming traffic and into a cacophony of squealing brakes and blaring horns. Alex turned right and sped through a red traffic light as it changed from yellow.
The Jaguar was no longer in sight.
“Terrific!” Joanna said.
“Not so terrific.” He kept glancing worriedly at the rearview mirror. “We shouldn’t have lost them. Not that easily.”
“Easily? You think that was easy? We nearly wrecked half a dozen times!”
“They kill like professionals, so they ought to be able to run a tail like professionals. Should’ve kept on top of us every minute. They had a better car than this one. And they must be a lot more familiar with these streets than we are. It’s just like this morning with the other Jaguar. It’s as if they wanted to let us get away—so we’d feel safe.”
“But why would they be playing a game like that?”
He scowled. “I don’t know. I feel like we’re being manipulated, and I sure don’t like the feeling. It scares me.”
“Maybe they don’t have to take exceptional risks to keep us in view,” she said, “because they’ve got this car bugged. A concealed transmitter. Or am I being paranoid?”
“These days,” Alex said, “only the paranoid survive.”
Somewhere in the suburban sprawl, as the storm diluted the last light of dusk and washed it into a deep ocean of night, they stopped in the loneliest end of a shopping-center parking lot. Joanna stayed in the car and kept watch while Alex removed the license plates from their rental car and put them on a nearby Toyota. He didn’t put the Toyota plates on the rental but kept them for later use.
A few miles farther on, they stopped at a busy roadside supper club. Over rolling thunder and the incessant roar of the rain, big-band music and laughter drifted through the drenched night.
Alex checked parked cars for unlocked doors, then looked inside each accessible vehicle in hope of finding keys in the ignition. In a silver-gray Ford, he discovered what he was looking for under the driver’s seat.
Alex drove away in the stolen vehicle. Joanna stayed close behind him in the rental car. As far as he could tell, no one followed them.
In an apartment-complex parking lot, they quickly transferred their bags to the Ford. They abandoned the rental, sans license plates, and went in search of a quiet residential neighborhood.
Ten minutes later, they parked on a street lined with
relatively new, identical, single-family brick houses with shallow front lawns and bare-limbed trees, where Alex removed the Ford’s license plates and replaced them with the set he had taken from the Toyota in the shopping center. He dropped the Ford’s tags into a drainage grate at the curb, and they splashed into the dark water below.
The owner of the Toyota was unlikely to notice immediately that his plates had been replaced with those from the rental car. And when the Ford was reported stolen back at the supper club, police would be looking for a car with the plates that were now lost in the storm drain.
By the time they were on the move again, Alex and Joanna were soaked and shivering, but they felt safer. He turned up the heater to its maximum setting. It was going to take a while to chase away the chill, because he was cold all the way into his bones.
54
Joanna fiddled with the car radio until she located a sta- tion playing Beethoven. The beautiful music relieved her tension.
Using complimentary road maps provided by the car-rental agency, they got lost only three times before they were headed south on the correct highway. They were going to Brighton, on the coast, where Alex intended to spend the night.
For years Joanna had thought that the highway they now traveled was the same on which Robert and Elizabeth Rand had lost their lives. But both London and this outlying landscape were new and strange to her. Hard as it was to accept, she now knew that she had never spent her childhood and adolescence in London, as she had believed for so long; this was her first visit to England. Robert and Elizabeth Rand had existed only in a handful of phony documents—and, of course, in her mind.
As the windshield wipers thumped like a heartbeat, she thought of her real father, Thomas Chelgrin, lying dead on that hotel-room floor, and she wished that the image of the bloodied senator could reduce her to tears. Feeling grief would be better than feeling nothing at all. But her heart was closed to him.
She put one hand on Alex’s shoulder, just to reassure herself that he was real and that she was not alone.
He glanced at her, evidently sensed her mood, and winked.
The storm continued without surcease. On the black highway, the headlights shimmered like the lambent glow of the moon reflecting off the glassy surface of a swift-flowing river.
“Just west of Brighton,” Alex said, “on the way to Worthing, there’s a quaint little inn called The Bell and The Dragon. It’s a couple hundred years old but beautifully kept, and the food’s quite good.”
“Won’t we need a reservation?”
“Not this late in the year. The tourist season is long past. They ought to have a few nice rooms available.”
When they arrived at The Bell and The Dragon a short while later, the only sign announcing it was a large wooden billboard hung from a crossbar between two posts near the highway—no neon, no well-lighted announcement panel advertising an early-bird dinner special or a piano bar. The inn was tucked in a stand of ancient oaks, and the parking lot was nearly as dark as it must have been in the days when the guests arrived in horse-drawn coaches. It was a rambling structure, pleasing to the eye, half brick and half plaster with a crosswork of rugged, exposed beams. The front doors were fashioned from oak timbers and featured hand-carved plaques indicating that beds, food, and drink were offered inside. In the lobby and public rooms, soft electric lights hidden in converted gas lamps imparted a marvelous luster to the polished, richly inlaid paneling.
Alex and Joanna were given spacious quarters on the second floor. White plaster walls. Darkly stained beams. A pegged oak floor protected by plush area carpets.
Joanna examined the griffin-head water spouts in the bathroom, was pleased to find that the stone fireplace in the bedroom would actually work if they chose to use it, and finally threw herself on the four-poster bed. “It’s absolutely delightful.”
“It belongs to another age—one more hospitable than ours.”
“It’s charming. I love it. How often have you stayed here?”
The question appeared to surprise him. He stared at her but didn’t speak.
She sat up on the bed. “What’s wrong?”
He turned slowly in a full circle, studying the room. At last he said, “I’ve never stayed here before.”
“Who told you about it?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. I’ve never been to Brighton before, can’t remember ever talking to anyone about it—except to you, of course. This is the third time today.”
“The third time what?” Joanna asked.
He went to the nearest window and gazed into the rainy darkness beyond. “It’s the third time I’ve known about something I shouldn’t know about. Have no way of knowing about. Creepy. Before I opened that note this morning, I knew it was from the senator.”
“That was just a good guess,” Joanna said.
“And before we ever got to his hotel room, before I saw that his door was ajar, I knew Tom Chelgrin was dead.”
“Intuition.”
Alex turned away from the window, shaking his head. “No. This place is more than a hunch. I knew the name—The Bell and The Dragon. I knew exactly how it would look, as if I’d seen it before.”
“Maybe someone told you about it, but you just don’t recall. Or you read about it in a travel article—one with photographs.”
“No. I’d remember,” he insisted.
“Not if it was a few years ago. Not if it was casual reading. Maybe a magazine in a doctor’s office. Something you skimmed and pretty much forgot, except this place stuck in your subconscious.”
“Maybe,” he said, though he was obviously unconvinced.
He turned to the window again, put his face close to the glass, and stared into the night, as if certain that people were out there staring back at him.
55
With the descent of night in London, the temperature had dropped ten degrees. It now hovered at the freezing point. The wind had grown stronger, and the rain had become sleet.
On his way home from the Fielding Athison offices in Soho, Marlowe—previously in charge of all Soviet operations that had used the importing company as a front, now working for post-Soviet forces that still dreamed of a Russian Marxist Utopia—drove slowly and cursed the weather. He kept his head tucked down and his shoulders drawn up in anticipation of a collision. Everywhere he looked, cars slid on the icy pavement, and as far as he could tell, he was the only motorist in all of Greater London who wasn’t driving like a suicidal maniac.
In a line of work that demanded caution, Marlowe was one of the most cautious men he knew. He had committed himself to a life of treason, which was, thank you very much, more than enough risk for any man. Having made that one dangerous decision, he tried thereafter to ensure that espionage would be as thoroughly safe and serene an occupation as floral arrangement or managing a tobacco shop. He abhorred taking any action without first thinking through all the ramifications, and he was always markedly slower to act than any of his associates. He kept four stashes of false passports and getaway cash at various places in England, as well as secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Grand Cayman.
His aversion to risk extended beyond his working world into his private life. He participated in no leisure sports that were likely to result in broken bones or torn ligaments. He didn’t hunt, because occasionally one saw stories in the press about hunting accidents, chaps shooting themselves or one another, either out of carelessness or because they’d mistaken one another for game. He had acquaintances who enjoyed hot-air ballooning, which he considered no safer than bungee jumping off high bridges, so he refused to join them on their mad weekend flights. He faithfully followed a low-fat, low-salt diet. He never drank alcoholic beverages or any beverage containing caffeine. He ate only trace amounts of refined sugar, always bundled up well and wore a hat in cold weather, underwent a complete physical examination twice a year, never had sex without a condom, and drove as sedately as an octogenarian vicar.
On the roadway ahead, an
other driver stood on the brakes, and the car fishtailed wildly on the ice-sheathed pavement.
Marlowe tamped his brakes judiciously and congratulated himself on having left enough room to stop short of a collision.
Behind him, the brakes of another vehicle squealed horribly.
Marlowe winced, gritted his teeth, and counted the seconds until impact.
Miraculously, no crash ensued.
“Morons,” Marlowe said.
He cherished life. He intended to die no sooner than his one hundredth birthday—and then in bed with a young woman. A very young woman. Two very young women.
At the moment his anxiety was exacerbated by his inability to concentrate on his driving to the degree he would have liked. In spite of the constant fear that some lunatic would plow into him, he couldn’t prevent his mind from wandering. The past few days had been filled with signs and portents, bad omens—and he couldn’t stop mulling them over, trying to decide what they meant.
First, he had come out of the confrontation with Ignacio Carrera less well than expected. When he’d tried to learn Joanna Rand’s real name, he had been operating on his long-held conviction that he and Carrera were equals in the eyes of the masters whom they served. Instead, he’d been slapped down. Hard. Then word had come from Moscow that Marlowe was to back off the Rand situation, obey Carrera, and leave the mysterious woman unharmed even if she blundered into the offices of Fielding Athison and threatened to disrupt the entire operation.
Marlowe was still smarting from that loss of face when the grotesque Anson Peterson swept in from America and began issuing commands with royal arrogance. Marlowe wasn’t permitted to see the Rand woman, not even a photograph of her. He was told not to speak to her if she should call British-Continental again. He was not even supposed to think about her any more. Peterson was in charge of the operation, and Marlowe was instructed to go about his other work as if he knew nothing whatsoever about the crisis.
But Marlowe was reluctant to surrender even a single minor prerogative of his position. He jealously guarded his authority and privileges; it was dangerous to relinquish even a small amount of hard-won power. One backward step on the ladder could turn into a long, bone-crunching fall to the bottom, because everywhere there were schemers who envied their betters and were willing to give them a killing push over the brink at the first sign of weakness.