The Crooked Staircase

by Dean Koontz

  “Machines of flesh,” she repeated. “There are high-end brothels for wealthy, powerful people who fund this conspiracy. I managed to get into one—and out alive. The girls are beautiful beyond words. But they have no memories. No awareness of who they once were or of a world beyond the brothel. No hopes. No dreams. No interests except staying fit, desirable. Programmed to provide any sexual pleasure. Totally submissive. Never disobedient. No desire is so extreme they won’t satisfy it. They’re soft-spoken, sweet, apparently happy, but it’s all programmed. They’re incapable of expressing anger, sadness. Somewhere deep inside…what if there is something left in one of them, some palest shadow of real human feeling and awareness, some thread of self-respect, some fragile hope? Then her body is a prison. A life of unrelieved loneliness in a solitary hell. I’ve dreamed of being one of them. I wake up shaking as if with malaria. I’m not ashamed to say I’m terrified of ending like that, stripped of all free will. Because once the control mechanism assembles in the brain, there’s no removing it, no way out except death.”

  18

  A dragon’s-egg moon emerged from a nest of shredding clouds harried southeast by a high wind that had no presence here at ground level. The oaks were widely separated now, each the majesty of its domain, black-limbed and cragged and crooked, like the scorched but stalwart survivors of a cataclysm, or oracles warning of some dire event impending. The land grew less hospitable to grass, and the last upslope was patterned with faint tree-cast moonshadows on a carpet of wet pebbles and scraggly clumps of flattened sedge.

  In spite of the inexplicable danger in which Tanuja and her brother found themselves, she could not help but see the story potential in this bizarre situation. Even as she hurried toward the crest of the last hill, a novel was germinating, a contemporary take on “Hansel and Gretel,” a brother and sister transported from the primeval woods of Germany to the semidesert wildlands of Southern California, their adversary not a witch who lived in a house made of bread and cake, but instead some fearsome sect or wicked fellowship. What she had always liked most about Hansel and Gretel was that they kicked ass; after Gretel shoved the witch into the oven and bolted it shut, she and Hansel filled their pockets with the vicious hag’s fortune of pearls and jewels.

  Gasping for breath, she and Sanjay reached the crest, where the source of the red, blue, and yellow auras that drew them through the darkness now flared bright below them. The sole structure in sight, a commercial building made to resemble a log house, advertised itself with a double row of neon tubes around the roofline; and in the enormous sign at the front, the words COOGAN’S CROSSROADS blazed within the glowing outline of a giant cowboy hat.

  At least twenty vehicles were parked in front of and beside the establishment. Faint country music found its way into the night from a barroom jukebox.

  Tanuja followed Sanjay down a slippery slope of rain-sodden half-collapsed masses of foot-snaring Aureola grass and onto the east-west two-lane that made a crossroads with a north-south route.

  As they entered Coogan’s parking lot, a few bars of “Macarena” by Los Del Río issued from a pocket of Sanjay’s jeans, bringing him to a halt. As the ringtone repeated, he fished out the smartphone that belonged to one of the men who had invaded their house.

  “Don’t answer it,” Tanuja warned.

  “I won’t,” Sanjay said. “I took this so we’d eventually be able to get a lead on who they are.”

  “Who’s calling? What’s their number?”

  “No ID,” Sanjay said.

  Although he did not accept the call, a connection was somehow effected. A long chain of binary code, like a centipede racing along a switchback path, flowed down the screen from top to bottom. The code vanished, the blue background blinked to white, and two black lines, labeled with route numbers, portrayed the crossroads at which they had arrived. A blinking red indicator could have represented nothing else but the position of the smartphone.

  “Shit!” Sanjay said. “They just located us.”

  “How’s that possible?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Tanuja looked toward the north-south route, dark at the moment and untraveled. “They’ll be coming.”

  The building featured a plank porch elevated on two-foot log piers. Sanjay ran to it and threw the phone between two plants in a decorative fringe of cushion spurge, into the dark space far back under the porch.

  Engine noise arose and swiftly grew louder. Out of the south, from the direction of the ruins of Honeydale Stables, a wash of light, undulating with the contours of the road, swelled behind a windbreak of eucalyptuses.

  Tanuja and Sanjay, of the same mind without the need to speak, ran to one of the parked vehicles—a truck with a thirty-foot bed, tall slat-wood sides, and an arched canvas canopy fitted to a metal frame. They scaled the tailgate and swung into the dark cargo area, where just enough light entered to suggest that they were aboard a landscaper’s truck more than half full of large ferns and Rhapis palms growing in soil-filled ten-gallon plastic nursery buckets. They crouched four feet from the tailgate, beyond where the neon radiance might reflect off their faces, the fronds of the young Australian tree ferns cascading over and around them.

  A moment later, the engine noise peaked. Headlights swept the parking area, one pair and then another. First past the landscaper’s tailgate was a sheriff’s department cruiser, employing neither its sirens nor its lightbar, braking to a stop at the steps to the plank porch, where the yellow-striped pavement warned against parking.

  Close behind the squad car came the Chevy crew-cab on jacked tires, the front passenger door caved and incompletely closed and rattling, held shut by the man riding shotgun. The pickup pulled into an empty slot between two SUVs. The driver killed the engine and got out with two other men. Evidently the injured man had been left back at the bridge to fend for himself. The driver went around the north side of Coogan’s Crossroads, the other two around the south side, evidently intending to rendezvous at the back of the tavern, where there were a kitchen entrance and an emergency exit.

  Two uniformed deputies got out of the cruiser and climbed the steps to the porch, stood there for a moment surveying the parking lot, and then went inside.

  “We’re so chodu if we stay here,” Tanuja said just as Sanjay said, “They don’t find us in there, they’ll check these vehicles.”

  One at a time, they slipped over the tailgate and out of the landscaper’s truck.

  They expected to be on foot again, a dismal prospect with miles between them and any pocket of civilization in which they might be able to hide and buy time to think. Plus they would be unarmed at night in coyote country, just when those prairie wolves might venture forth, sharp-toothed and merciless, in the wake of the rain.

  Then a crackle of police-band radio static drew their attention to the cruiser and alerted them that its engine was idling.

  “We can’t,” Sanjay said.

  Tanuja said, “In like three minutes they’ll know we’re not in Coogan’s.”

  She hurried to the black-and-white, and Sanjay followed.

  The window in the driver’s door had been rolled down. The voice of a dispatcher sought assistance on an 11-80 in Silverado Canyon, whatever an 11-80 might be.

  Tanuja got behind the wheel and popped the emergency brake as Sanjay slid into the other front seat. She reversed away from the tavern.

  19

  The unforgiving light in the windowless basement room, the air as cool as that in a meat locker, the chemical smell, the underlying odor best left unanalyzed, the funeral director’s voice soft with respect and sympathy, and the settled sorrow in his eyes…

  He repeated what she’d told him regarding anyone injected with a nanotech control mechanism. “ ‘No way out except death’?”

  By turning her words into a question, he was asking not for her to confirm the fate of those inj
ected, but for her assurance that she truly believed, even in the face of her massed enemies and the unprecedented threat she had described, that there was a future for her, some way out of this other than death. If her sole hope was to save the life of her child at the cost of her own, if her truest analysis of the situation convinced her that she could bring down the conspirators only with a mortal sacrifice, she was not like the Marines with whom he had gone into battle. They had fought for their country and no less for one another, but they also had gone into every fight with the conviction that survival was likely.

  As the wife of a Marine, Jane understood Gilberto’s concern. A warrior couldn’t be without fear, for the fearless were often also reckless, putting the mission at risk. However, neither should anyone enter combat with the expectation of certain death, because no fighter fought well in such a state of diminished spirit.

  “I need to live for Travis,” she said. “I will live for the pleasure of seeing these arrogant creeps ruined, their power ripped from them, imprisoned for life, although I’d much rather see them lined up against a wall and shot. I’m not fearless or nihilistic. I’ll make mistakes. But I won’t throw my life away—or yours.”

  “Sorry to make you say it.”

  “I would have done the same if I were you.”

  “So who’s this Department of Justice guy we’re kidnapping?”

  “Name’s Booth Hendrickson.” She zippered open her tote bag and took from it a manila envelope, which she passed to Gilberto. “Study this photo till you’re sure you’ll recognize him, then destroy it.”

  “When do you need me for the job?”

  “Tomorrow at ten-thirty in the morning, you’ll pick him up at the private-aircraft terminal at Orange County airport.”

  As if the dead man’s pallor were caused by what he heard being discussed, eyes closed as though in prayer, he lay between them like some priest without vestments, distressed and rendered supine by the weight of the crimes that they were confessing.

  “Our hearse can’t pass for a limousine,” Gilberto said.

  “I’ll have a limo for you. His brother owns a limousine company in addition to a lot of other things. He’ll feel safe getting in one of his brother’s limos, with one of his brother’s drivers.”

  She talked him through how it would be done, then took from the tote a leather shoulder rig with a weapon in the holster, a polymer-frame Heckler & Koch .45 Compact like the one she carried.

  “I don’t see any way you’ll need a gun,” she said. “But this is the devil’s world, and he never rests. It has a nine-round magazine with semi-staggered ammo stacks. Allows for a nice grip.”

  Instead of accepting it, he said, “I have a gun of my own. I like the feel of it. I know its quirks.”

  “But it might be traced back to you. This one has no history. Take it. Use it if you have to.”

  She put the rig and pistol on the shrouded chest of the dead man. From the tote she took a spare magazine and a sound suppressor for the Heckler. She also put those on the corpse and then added a disposable phone. “You’ll need a burner phone during the operation. The number for my burner is taped to the back of yours.”

  Gilberto said, “Even if you win some kind of safety for you and Travis…even then you lose.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Because you can’t put the nano genie back in the bottle.”

  “No one could uninvent the atomic bomb, either. But here we still are.”

  “At least for today.”

  “None of us ever has more than this moment. Tomorrow becomes today, today becomes yesterday. The best I can do for my boy is give him enough todays that he can make a past for himself that will have had some meaning in it.”

  She zippered shut the tote bag. She came around the mortician’s table and put one hand on the back of Gilberto’s neck and pulled his face to hers until their foreheads touched. They stood that way in silence for a long moment. Then she kissed his cheek and left the room and left the building and went into the night, which always held the promise of being the last night of the world.

  20

  Tanuja was driving fast and well, not perturbed by her lack of familiarity with the vehicle. But the events of the evening were so extraordinary, whipsawing her emotions so violently, she felt almost as though reality was plastic and being remade around her, as easily as she might reimagine it in fiction, the land on both sides of the police car like a black and alien sea, the wild rolling hills not hills at all, but the humped backs of Devonian beasts swimming as they swam four hundred million years earlier.

  Because he had written a few stories featuring police, Sanjay knew where to find the controls for the siren and the lightbar. Tanuja used them only in the no-passing zones, when she needed to encourage slower traffic to pull off the road and let her pass.

  They dared not use the car for long, and Tanuja wanted to get as deep into the communities of west county as possible. The more populous the territory, the more options they would have, although at the moment she couldn’t grasp what one of those options might be.

  “We’ve gotta hole up tonight, think this through,” Sanjay said.

  “Hole up where, with whom?”

  “Not friends. We don’t know what we might bring down on them.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “who do we trust? We don’t even know why.”

  After a silence, Sanjay said, “Stop at the first Wells Fargo ATM. All I have is like a hundred eighty bucks. You?”

  “Not a dime.”

  “They tracked our car’s GPS. So maybe they’ll also know when I use a credit card for a motel room.”

  “Is that possible? Tracking credit-card use in real time?”

  “I don’t know what’s possible anymore, Tanny. It seems like any damn thing is possible. So we need as much cash as we can get.”

  At 8:50 P.M., after withdrawing six hundred dollars from a Wells Fargo ATM, they found an office complex in Lake Forest that provided a deserted parking lot in which they left the police cruiser. As far as they were able to tell, they abandoned the car without drawing attention to themselves.

  Mottled sulfur yellow by the upwash of suburban light, rags of dark clouds unraveled across a sky in which an incomplete moon hung in a strange deformity—or so it seemed to Tanuja—as if the shadow that cloaked part of it was cast by a misshapen Earth. The stars appeared misplaced, arranged in no familiar constellations, and the concrete underfoot seemed to move ever so subtly. In a few minutes, they arrived at a major thoroughfare on which traffic flashed and growled, along which crowded a smorgasbord of fast-food restaurants and a riot of enterprises that included, half a block to their left, a motor inn that was part of a medium-priced national chain and, less than half a block to their right, a less polished motel.

  Even from a distance, neither the brand name nor the generic option appealed as a refuge in which to spend the night, and in fact something about each seemed, if not sinister, at least foreboding. Tanuja assumed that this perceived menace was imaginary, a product of her anxiety and the disorientation that arose from being targeted for reasons unknown—until Sanjay said, “Even if we pay cash when we check in, I don’t like this. It feels wrong. There must be somewhere else we can go.”

  21

  From the funeral home in Orange, Jane Hawk drove south to a recently annexed portion of Newport Beach that featured several guard-gated enclaves of multimillion-dollar estates. One of these had belonged to Sara Holdsteck until her former husband, Simon Yegg, wrested it from her.

  Jane parked at an all-night supermarket in an upscale shopping center. Carrying her leather tote bag, she set out on foot. The traffic whizzing past on the parkway to her left seemed like a sales-lot-in-motion for Mercedes, BMW, and Ferrari.

  She walked perhaps a mile and a half along a sidewalk flanked by lush landscaping, encountering neither residences
nor businesses, nor other pedestrians. There were only the imposing guardhouse gates fronting the exclusive communities and, between them, glimpses of the moon-washed canyon above which those mansions had been built.

  Although the entrances appeared formidable, these communities were not surrounded by complete, uniform barriers. Each homeowner had built an enclosure—iron staves, glass panels, stone—compatible with the design of his house. Where the community’s common spaces met the canyon, there was either wrought-iron fencing or nothing at all; if the canyon slope was rugged and steep, it was assumed that thieves wouldn’t make the climb to burglarize a house when, should the job go wrong, the only hope of escape would be on foot.

  Having left the sidewalk to proceed cautiously along the grassy crest of the canyon, guided by moonlight and, when the lunar lamp was insufficient, by a small flashlight that she hooded with one hand, Jane found an unfenced transit point between the canyon and one of the community’s common areas. Less than a minute later, she was on a sidewalk again, on a street behind the guardhouse gates.

  She wasn’t concerned that she would be suspected of intrusion. There were more than 150 homes in the community; no single guard could be expected to recognize all the residents, not to mention houseguests. If the lone patrol car happened upon her, she would smile and wave and most likely earn a smile and a wave in return.

  Thanks to Google Earth and Google Maps, she had familiarized herself with the layout of the looping streets. She needed only a few minutes to reach the Yegg residence.

  The immense Mediterranean Revival–style house was clad in limestone, featured arched windows recessed in carved-limestone surrounds, and had an entrance sheltered by a dramatic portico with massive columns supporting an elaborately detailed entablature.

  She approached the front door as though she belonged there. The windows were dark.

  According to Sara Holdsteck, when Simon moved in prior to their wedding, he wanted no servants in the house on weeknights or weekends. Two housekeepers worked from eight till five, Monday through Friday. It was unlikely that he would have changed this routine.