by Dean Koontz
When she opened the front passenger door, Randall Larkin muttered wordlessly under his face cloth and almost slid out of the car. She pushed him upright, and with heavy-duty plastic zip-ties taken from her purse, she cuffed his wrists and then his ankles.
She got her hands under his arms and dragged him out of the Mercedes and wrestled him onto the cart, with his feet extending over the bottom braceboard.
The cotton handkerchief had slipped off his face. She replaced it and spritzed it lightly with chloroform.
She pushed the cart to the factory door and paused to withdraw the soapstone cameo from a pocket of her jeans. In the hard morning light, she considered the soft features of the carved portrait on the fragment of a broken locket. Beyond the fence, the river spoke in a multitude of liquid tongues, splashed and babbled and chortled and hissed, but after a moment she didn’t hear it. Nor did she quite see the cameo, veiled as it was by the face of her child that came into focus in her mind’s eye, sweet Travis, the image of his father, the vessel into which she had poured all her hopes.
After a minute or two, she pocketed the cameo. She rolled the cart and the lolling attorney into the factory. She closed the door behind them.
4
* * *
When after five minutes the blinking Randall signifier on the screen does not move from the alleyway, Diamanta uses the breakfast-room landline extension to call her husband’s iPhone. After five rings, she is sent to voice mail.
Next, she calls Randall’s office back line, which rings only on his desk, not on his secretary’s phone station. No more than five or six people have this number, and Randall always answers it if he is there. Diamanta is again sent to voice mail.
She is not a person who alarms easily, nor is there much in the world that she fears, as she has the fullest confidence both in her ability to cope with any adversity and in her destiny, which will be as magnificent as she herself.
Consequently, when Holmes, the butler, serves a plate of over-easy eggs with smoked salmon and butter-roasted brussels sprouts, which has been prepared by Elizabeth, his wife and the other half of the house management team, Diamanta sits down to her first meal of the day. She tells herself that Randall either must have dropped his phone in the alley without realizing it or must be in conversation there with perhaps the head of maintenance, who—yes, of course—is trying to fix the roll-up garage door, which has failed to function, as has happened once or twice before.
Halfway through breakfast, watching the blinking signifier, Diamanta changes her mind. Something is wrong.
5
* * *
Ten minutes after conveying the attorney into the factory, Jane Hawk returned to the Mercedes, carrying a concrete block.
The car contained a GPS by which it could be located. Once others who were not early birds came to work at Woodbine, Kravitz, Larkin, and Benedetto, eventually they would realize that the third-named partner had missed his first appointment. Supposing Woodbine or Kravitz or Benedetto, or all of them, were tentacles of the billionaire David James Michael, as committed to making a better world through the elimination of those on the Hamlet list as was Randall Larkin, and supposing they knew about her visit to Lawrence Hannafin the previous day and her failure to call him at noon as promised, and supposing not all of them were as stupid as they were evil, at least one of them would arrive at the correct conclusion that somehow she’d tapped into the Hannafin-Larkin conversations and that now, on this bright new day, she had kidnapped their associate on his way to get the first worm of the day and its entire family. They would never go to the police. They wouldn’t need the police. Their contacts ran all the way up to the Bureau and Homeland Security and the NSA. There would be an urgent search to find the Mercedes by its GPS identifier.
Two days earlier, when Jane had cut the shackle on the front-gate padlock with a bolt cutter, she had also cut two vertical slits in the chain link behind the factory, parallel to each other and eight feet apart. She’d severed the chain link from the bottom rail as well, so the eight-foot section hung only from the headrail of the fence, seven feet above the ground.
Now she sat behind the wheel of the Mercedes and started the engine. She swung the sedan around to face the loose curtain of chain link and braked at a distance of twenty feet. The PARK control was a push-button on the end of the gearshift, which extended from the right side of the steering column. The emergency brake was operated not by a foot pedal but by an electronic push-pull control to the left of the steering wheel and directly under the headlight dial. She left the car in PARK, emergency brake engaged, engine idling, and driver’s door open.
She fetched the concrete block from where she’d left it near the building. She brought it to the sedan and put it on the accelerator. The engine roared, a masterpiece of German engineering, but the car was in PARK and held by the emergency brake.
Leaning through the open door, Jane reached across the steering wheel and shifted from PARK to DRIVE. The S600 shivered like an excited steed, but the brake held.
Warning herself to be quick or suffer a broken arm, she hooked her fingers under the push-pull control on the nearer side of the steering wheel, disengaged the emergency brake, and reeled backward in the same motion.
Engine roaring, the Mercedes rocketed away from her. The forward force slammed the driver’s door shut. The front bumper met the curtain of chain link at more than a sufficient speed to cast it outward, and the big car crashed through. The flap of fence rattled across the vehicle, no doubt scarring the lovingly cared-for finish, but with too light an impact to shatter the windshield. Within six feet, even as the chain-link drapery rattled down its rear window and across its trunk, the sedan found the embankment and plunged out of sight.
Jane stepped to the fence as it swung back into place, just in time to see the Mercedes appear on the long slope that led to the hundred-foot-wide concrete channel below. The heavy block must still be on the accelerator, because the car continued to gain speed. It vaulted off the river wall, airborne for a second or two, and did a belly flop into the racing waters.
All the windows were up, and the car remained buoyant, as it would for quite a while. A marvelous machine, tightly made, it would admit water through the heating vents, but so slowly that it would be many miles downriver before it was half submerged, and even then the force of the flood tide would carry it onward.
She watched the sedan pitch and yaw and wallow in the waves, something almost jaunty about its progress, as if it were setting out on a holiday. She thought she should have turned on the radio and found some Jimmy Buffett or the equivalent to provide it with a suitable soundtrack.
Directly across the great divide of churning water and for some distance upstream, undeveloped hills of scrub rose in serried rolls of spring green. She thought it most unlikely that a hiker or some vagrant camper happened to be over there and happened to be looking this way in the five or six seconds during which the Mercedes burst through the fence and plummeted into the river. But if anyone had seen from where the car had come, he would be more interested in—and more likely to report—where it was urgently bound, convinced that it carried imperiled occupants.
The curtain of chain link sang softly until it found its former stillness, and then hung as if welded to the panels that flanked it.
Jane returned to the abandoned factory.
6
* * *
Jason Alan Drucklow, a licensed private detective in thirty-nine states, has spent most of his life doing opposition research for political-campaign managers of both major parties. He has been expected to find the best dirt on various governors, senators, and congressmen, everything from their extramarital affairs to the keen pleasure they took, as children, in torturing animals—or as adults, for that matter.
In his youth and early middle age, this work proved equally challenging and titillating. He became a master at destroying reputations, whether by uncovering deeply hidden truths or by manufacturing credible falsehoo
ds and creating the evidence to support them.
By the time he was forty, however, he grew jaded. He no longer found satisfaction in proving that a politician had taken a payoff from a Saudi prince or by forging historical documents that appeared to convict a candidate’s father of serving as a Grand Kleagle in the Ku Klux Klan and of having fed people of color to a wood chipper. His boredom metastasized into an ennui so profound he couldn’t get out of bed some days, and his career seemed to be over. For men with his talents, however, unexpected opportunities arise.
He now makes terrific money working for a man who calls himself Marshall Ackerman, which may or may not be his real name. Ackerman is employed by a nonprofit called Volunteers for a Better Tomorrow. Based on Jason Drucklow’s careful research, Volunteers for a Better Tomorrow may or may not be run by surrogates of David James Michael. That discovery has both reassured Jason that he will always be paid but also discouraged him from probing any further into the chain of command through which he receives his directions, lest he end up in a wood chipper, metaphorically speaking.
This Friday morning, he receives an encrypted email from Ackerman, who wants him to ascertain, stat, the whereabouts of Randall Larkin, whose wife cannot reach him.
Jason lives in—and conducts business from—a luxury apartment in a highly desirable building on Wilshire Boulevard, in Beverly Hills, not far from the offices of Woodbine, Kravitz, Larkin, and Benedetto. He does not pay rent. Neither does he have to spend his own money to acquire the computers, printers, scanners, and other state-of-the-art tech that outfits his home office.
The first thing that Jason Alan Drucklow does from his primary computer is enter the National Security Agency’s vast data empire by a back door that he has been assured is approved by the very highest officials of that agency, for whom Volunteers for a Better Tomorrow is a valued, secret associate.
In cities all over America—and not just in cities—traffic and venue cameras assist in preserving the security of the people while providing a historical record of various activities. Jason accesses an NSA program that coordinates the video systems of nearly all law-enforcement jurisdictions nationwide, making it possible to skip to any location coast-to-coast to obtain a real-time view of what might be occurring there.
In about a minute and a half, he discovers that Beverly Hills maintains no traffic cam in the alleyway behind Randall Larkin’s law offices. Fortunately there are cameras on the parallel main streets connected by the alley, and video archives might show the attorney arriving at work earlier in the morning.
7
* * *
Randall Larkin, still unconscious, sat in one of the patio chairs, his hands no longer cuffed, his ankles no longer shackled. Each forearm was zip-tied to an arm of the chair, each ankle to one of the front legs, so that he could not stand.
Jane waited in the second chair, facing her captive from a distance of about eight feet.
The Coleman lantern hissed softly as a steady mist of vaporized fuel escaped the valve into the incandescent fabric mantle.
Head hung forward, breathing shallowly, Larkin regained consciousness slowly at first. He mumbled senseless syllables, a snail’s trail of saliva ribboning from one corner of his mouth and dripping from his jaw onto a pant leg of his fine medium-gray suit. Twice he hummed-sang a few bars of a slurred version of a tune that she didn’t recognize. His fingers stroked the aluminum arms of the chair as if the smooth texture appealed to him.
After a while, he raised his head and opened his eyes and blinked in stupefaction. He squinted at the white-hot mantle of the lantern and then noticed Jane. He frowned at her and smacked his lips and said, “Dream,” before closing his eyes.
A couple minutes later, when he raised his head and looked again, he knew he wasn’t dreaming. “You. Who’re you?”
“Think about it,” she suggested.
When he tried to lift a hand to wipe the drool from his face, he seemed to realize for the first time that he was trammeled. He strained against the zip-ties, tried to kick his feet, rattling the chair against the concrete floor.
The stare he turned on her was sharper than before. “The alley. The girl in the alley. What’re you doing here?”
She spoke calmly and as if she were concerned for him. “Maybe you need to think about what you’re doing here.”
“Do I know you? I don’t know you.”
“You’ve never met me, but you know me.”
“What’s this—a riddle? Don’t riddle me. Why would you riddle me?”
“It’s the wig you don’t know,” she explained patiently. “The wig and the eye shadow and the blue lipstick and the nose ring.”
He puzzled over that for a moment, and then his eyes widened with understanding. He had unusual light-brown eyes, the color of khaki, with darker striations.
“Jane Hawk,” he said.
“Ah. Now you’re almost back from the land of Nod.”
He tested his restraints again. “How did I get here? What did you do to me? I’ve got this weird sweet taste in my mouth.”
“Chloroform.”
He worked his tongue tooth to tooth, thinking about the word. “You’re out of your mind. You’re bat-shit crazy.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Not from my perspective.”
“This is kidnapping.”
“That’s part of what it is.”
“You get life for kidnapping.”
“Don’t worry about me, Randy. I’m already wanted for murder.”
He was fully back to being Randall Larkin. His eyes told the story of a sharp mind now quickening to every implication of his situation. He looked at the barrel base of the table, the bottles of water on the table, the dog dishes, the lantern and can of fuel. He stared up at the high windows so faintly limned by the morning sun. He turned his head, surveying the darkness pressing against the sphere of spectral light in which they, in their two facing chairs, seemed to float as though outside of space and time.
Repeating the last words she had heard him speak to Lawrence Hannafin, Jane said, “Don’t burn the toast.”
He was clueless for only a moment and then realized that she’d heard their conversations. “Shit.”
“Pretty deep, too,” she said sympathetically.
Putting on his courtroom face, the fearless litigator cut her with a glare that must have intimidated countless witnesses in the throes of their testimony. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“I know,” she said. “But you will be.”
“You already know everything you need.”
“Not everything.”
“Even if you could crack me like an egg—and you can’t—there’s nothing I can tell you that you don’t already know.”
She watched him but did not reply.
The Coleman lantern hissed.
After perhaps a minute, he said, “Sorry, but silence doesn’t work with me.”
“I’m not working you with silence. I’m just waiting for you to get to the next most obvious thing you’re going to tell yourself to keep your shit together.”
He pretended more interest in the factory than in her. He squinted into the surrounding gloom. “Where are we?”
“A place.”
“They’ll find us.”
“I threw away your cellphone. Your Mercedes is already miles from here, rafting toward the ocean.”
“Rafting? What’s that mean?”
She shrugged.
After another mutual silence, he said, “You didn’t murder anyone. What I hear is, the two you killed drew down on you first. Self-defense.”
“There it is,” she said. “The next most obvious thing you’re going to tell yourself to keep your shit together.”
“You’re a rogue agent, you’re ice, but you’re not capable of cold-blooded murder.”
“You think?”
He smiled a smile da Vinci would never have cared to paint.
Her next silence was watchful, and his was smug.
Finally, he said, “The damn chloroform gave me a headache.”
“Good.”
The lantern hissed as if light itself were deflating and eternal darkness would enshroud them when the hissing ceased.
She said, “If I blow your brains out right now—even that wouldn’t be murder. It would be self-defense. You know why?”
He wouldn’t play at first. He met her stare and waited.
“Your associates threatened my little boy. Were you aware of that? They threatened to kill him. Kill him but rape him first. They threatened to pack him off to ISIS or Boko Haram as a sex slave. In fact, pack us both off, me and him.”
She could see that he hadn’t known—and that knowing had begun to change his calculations regarding her potential.
“What designer suit is that?” she asked.
Baffled by the change of subject, he said, “Suit?”
“Is that a Brunello Cucinelli, like some of the suits in Larry Hannafin’s closet?”
“What? No.”
“Whose suit is it, then?”
“What does it matter, a suit?”
“Whose suit is it?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I’m interested in everything about you, Randy. Whose suit is that?”
“It’s just a suit.”
Bolting up from the chair, she took a step toward him, her snarled shout ricocheting off the walls and through the raftered ceiling. “What designer suit are you wearing, asshole?”
He flinched, disquieted if not even alarmed that her bottled rage should be uncorked over something as trivial as his suit. “Zegna. Ermenegildo Zegna. It’s no big deal.”
“How much did it cost?”
“The suit? I don’t know. Maybe four thousand.”
“Who made the tie?”
“The tie?”
She loomed over him, leaned toward him. She slapped his face once, twice, with all her strength, so hard her hand stung. “Yeah, the freakin’ tie.”
