The Crooked Staircase

by Dean Koontz

  This marionette theater in which he has a role is well managed, and the necessary props never fail to appear where they are needed.

  He carries the insulated box to his room, where he uses his switchblade to slit the tape sealing the lid in place. Clouds of pale, cold vapor issue from perforated packets of dry ice that coddle a Medexpress container twice the size of a lunchbox.

  In a compartment without dry ice are hypodermic syringes, cannulas, and other items related to intravenous injections.

  In the bathroom, Gottfrey places the Medexpress container on the counter beside the sink. The digital readout reports an interior temperature of thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. He swings back the lid and counts twelve insulated sleeves of quilted, silvery material about an inch in diameter and seven inches long, each containing a glass ampule of cloudy amber fluid.

  Three ampules for each person residing at the Hawk ranch. The ranch manager, Juan Saba, and his wife, Marie. Ancel and Clare Hawk.

  Each set of three ampules contains a nanotech brain implant. A control mechanism. Hundreds of thousands of parts, maybe millions, each comprising just a few molecules. Inert until injected, warmed by the subject’s blood, they become brain-tropic.

  The concept intrigues Gottfrey. Although he has not received such an implant, he considers himself to be a marionette controlled by unknown forces. And when he injects people with these mechanisms, to some extent he becomes their puppeteer, a marionette who controls marionettes of his own. His mind controls their minds.

  The incredibly tiny nanoconstructs migrate through veins to the heart, then through arteries to the brain, where they penetrate the blood-brain barrier and pass through the walls of capillaries just as do vital substances that the brain needs. They enter the tissue of the brain and self-assemble into a complex weblike structure.

  The injected people are programmed to be obedient. They are made to forget they have been injected. They don’t know they are enslaved. They become “adjusted people.” The control is so complete that they will commit suicide if told to do so.

  Indeed, Clare and Ancel Hawk’s son, Nick, had been in a special class of adjusted people, those on the Hamlet list. The Arcadians have developed a computer model that identifies men and women who excel in their fields of endeavor and who possess certain traits that suggest they will become leaders with considerable influence in the culture; if those individuals hold positions on key issues that conflict with Arcadian philosophy and goals, they are injected and controlled. To doubly ensure they don’t influence others with their dangerous ideas and don’t pass their unique genomes on to a lot of children, they are instructed to kill themselves.

  This control mechanism might terrify Gottfrey if he didn’t believe that the brain and the body it controls are both illusions, as is everything else in so-called reality. His disembodied mind is the only thing that exists. When nothing is real, there is nothing to fear. You need only surrender to the Unknown Playwright who crafts the narrative and go where the play takes you; it’s like being in a fascinating dream from which you never wake.

  He closes the Medexpress container and returns with it to the bedroom, where he places it in the Styrofoam chest with the dry ice.

  When he goes out for dinner, he leaves the lights on and hangs the DO NOT DISTURB sign from the doorknob.

  6

  The shadowy room, the light of the TV that illuminated nothing, the dark at the windows, the moral darkness of Sunday Magazine…

  Clare’s chest felt tight, each breath constrained, as she stood watching a homicide detective, someone said to be a detective, a fortyish man who looked as clean-cut as any father on a family-friendly 1950s sitcom, but who must be dirtier than any drug dealer or pimp. He spoke of an exhumed body that didn’t exist, that had been ashes since the previous November, of toxicological tests that couldn’t have been conducted on ashes. He claimed to have evidence that Nick Hawk was murdered with his Marine-issue knife. It was known, he said, that Jane had been selling national-defense secrets to enemies of the country even then, and he speculated that Nick, a true American hero who had received the Navy Cross, might have grown suspicious of her, might have confronted her with his suspicions.

  Ancel rose from his chair. By nature he wasn’t an angry soul. He gave everyone the benefit of the doubt, rarely raised his voice, and dealt with difficult people by avoiding them. Clare had never seen him so incensed, though his rage might have been unnoticed by anyone but her, for it manifested only as a pulse in his temple, in the clenching of his jaws, in the set of his shoulders.

  With the program near its end, they stood in silent sentinel to outrageous deceit, as Jane’s father, Martin Duroc, was interviewed in his home, with a piano in the background to remind everyone of his renown. “Jane was a sweet but emotionally fragile child. And so young when she found her mother after the suicide.” He seemed to choke with emotion. “I’m afraid something snapped in her then. She became withdrawn. No amount of counseling or therapy helped. I felt as if I’d lost a wife and a daughter. Yet I never imagined she would become…what she is now. I pray she’ll turn herself in.”

  Jane knew that he’d killed her mother to marry another woman. He had supposedly been hundreds of miles from home that night, but in fact he’d been in the house, though she couldn’t prove his guilt.

  Now, the program ended as Duroc took a display handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit to dab at his eyes, and Clare said, “My God, what do we do? What can we do?”

  “I intend to get fall-down drunk,” Ancel said. “No other way I’ll be able to sleep tonight. And there’s nothin’ we can do for Jane. Damn the whole crooked lot of them.”

  Never in Clare’s experience had Ancel been drunk, and she doubted that he meant to lose himself in a bottle this time.

  He confirmed her doubt by turning to her and fluttering the fingers of one hand as if they were the pinions of a bird’s wing, a prearranged signal that meant time to fly.

  She couldn’t disagree. Jane had warned that the conspirators might become so frustrated by their inability to find her that they would come after her in-laws, hoping to use them to get her. Now that these vicious shits had pulled this stunt with Sunday Magazine, they would expect Clare and Ancel to make a statement to the press tomorrow. So they would come before dawn.

  The telephone rang.

  Ancel said, “It’s one friend or another, knows Jane, saw the show, wants to say they’re with us. Let it go to voice mail. It won’t be the last. I’m not in the mood tonight. Call ’em back tomorrow. I’m gettin’ that damn bottle of Scotch. What about you?”

  “This…it sickens me,” Clare said. “I’m furious and scared for her and…and I feel so helpless.”

  “What can I do, honey? What do you want to do?”

  “Can’t do a damn thing. This is so rotten. I’m going to bed.”

  “You won’t sleep. Not after this.”

  “I’ll take an Ambien. I can’t handle whisky like you, I’d be throwing up all night.” She was amazed at how convincingly she delivered her lines. They had never practiced a scene like this.

  They spoke no more as they prepared to leave before sunrise.

  Clare loved this house, their first and only, where they began their marriage, where they raised Nick, where they learned from Nick and Jane, during a visit, that she was pregnant with their first—and now only—grandchild. Clare wondered when they would be able to return. She wondered if.

  7

  Because the revolution is everything to him, Ivan Petro works seven days a week, and on this first Sunday in April, he seems destined also to work around the clock.

  He is based in Sacramento, where Techno Arcadians maintain a significant network in the state government, which is as corrupt as any, more so than most.

  He’s having dinner in his favorite Italian restaurant when he, like thousands of othe
r Arcadians, starts receiving text messages about the incident involving Jane Hawk in Lake Tahoe, including a photograph taken there, showing her current appearance.

  No hit team has been dispatched to nail her, because a late-season blizzard in the Sierra Nevada has grounded all helicopters.

  Although the highways in that territory are treacherous, they are passable. No one knows what she’s driving or in which direction she’s gone; but she probably will want to get out of the Tahoe area, all the way out of the storm, before going to ground for the night.

  If she flees west on Highway 50, she’ll be coming straight toward Ivan Petro.

  As he finishes a plate of saltimbocca, he checks the weather report and learns that snow is falling only as far as Riverton. In the twenty miles west of Riverton, there is no town of any size until Placerville, which has a population of maybe ten thousand.

  Ivan finishes a second glass of Chianti. He doesn’t order the two servings of cannoli that he was anticipating with such pleasure.

  An hour after nightfall, he’s in Placerville, stalking the so-called beautiful monster, on what is shaping up to be perhaps the most important night of his life.

  Ivan Petro appears to have a molecular density greater than that of mere flesh and bone, as though the substance of which he’s constituted was first made molten in a coke-fired oven before being poured into a man shape. Teeth as blunt and white as those of a horse, face broad and flushed as if he has spent his entire life in a stinging wind that has left this permanent coloration. People have called him “Big Guy” since he was eleven years old.

  Ivan is a hit team all by himself.

  It has been assumed that Jane must be staying in motels, paying cash and using forged ID, remaining nowhere more than a night or two. The national chains in the hospitality industry will accept cash in advance from someone without a credit card, but it is far from a common practice. To avoid raising an eyebrow and attracting undue attention, she most likely prefers mom-and-pop operations, one- and two-star motels more accustomed to cash transactions.

  Placerville is not so large that it offers scores of mom-and-pop motels. With his Department of Homeland Security credentials and his authoritative demeanor, using a description of Tahoe Jane but not her name, he receives cooperation from the clerks at the front desks of the establishments most likely to interest the fugitive.

  In any endeavor like this, luck plays a role. If Jane chose to continue through Placerville to Sacramento and points beyond, Ivan is wasting his time. But luck strikes after his second stop. He is in his Range Rover, a third motel address entered in his navigator, stopped at a red traffic light, when he sees a woman of interest come out of a supermarket.

  Carrying what appears to be a deli bag, she passes the Range Rover and crosses the street to the motel on the northwest corner. She resembles the photo of Jane incognita, taken in Tahoe: stylish chopped-shaggy black hair, a little Goth makeup around the eyes.

  He can’t see if she is wearing a nose ring or if her lipstick is blue, as in the photograph, but she’s a looker, wearing a sport coat that’s maybe cut for concealed-carry. And she has attitude, moves with grace and confidence that people often mention when talking about Jane Hawk.

  She walks past the motel office and along the covered walkway serving the rooms.

  The light changes to green, and Ivan eases through the intersection, timing it so that he is gliding past when she lets herself into Room 8.

  Most of the motel’s rooms are evidently not yet booked for the night, because only four vehicles stand in the parking lot. Only one of the four is anywhere near Room 8, and it is parked directly in front of that door: a metallic-gray Ford Explorer Scout.

  Ivan hangs a U-turn at the next intersection and pulls off the street, into an apartment complex across from the motel.

  The apartments are in an arrangement of bland stucco boxes tricked up with decorative iron stair railings and faux shutters in a sad attempt at style. In front of the buildings is a long pergola that, during the day, shades the vehicles of residents as well as those of visitors. It now provides moonshade for the Range Rover.

  The Explorer Scout is parked between lampposts, and with binoculars Ivan glasses the rear license plates. Using the computer terminal in the console of the customized Rover, he back-doors the California DMV and inputs the number. The vehicle is registered to Leonard Borland at an address in San Francisco.

  Ivan switches to Google Street and looks at what stands at that address: a ten-story apartment building. He suspects that if he visited the place, no tenant named Leonard Borland would live there.

  Rather than go to that trouble, he returns to the DMV system and seeks driver’s licenses issued to men named Leonard Borland, of which there are several with various middle names. None of them shares the address to which the Explorer Scout is registered.

  This might only mean that another Leonard Borland owns the Scout but does not drive it himself, does not drive at all.

  But what it might mean isn’t in this case worth considering.

  It’s been known for some time that Jane Hawk has a source for forged documents so well crafted that the forger is able to insert them undetected in government records, ensuring they will withstand scrutiny if she is stopped by the highway patrol.

  Minutes after checking out the various Leonard Borlands, Ivan Petro receives an electrifying phone call. The guardians with whom Travis Hawk’s mother entrusted him have been found in Borrego Springs, where they have been killed in an exchange of gunfire. The boy has yet to be located. A major search is being organized to comb every inch of the town and the surrounding Borrego Valley.

  Almost an hour later, following much fevered calculation, Ivan arrives at a course of action. He isn’t going to call for backup and allow the credit for the capture of Jane Hawk to go to those Arcadians above him in the revolution, many of whom are in the habit of adding to their resumes accomplishments that aren’t theirs.

  He calls them poachers, though never to their face. They are dangerous people, such vipers that it’s amazing they aren’t poisoned by the potency of their own venom. He treats them with unfailing respect, though he despises them.

  However, he is self-aware enough to know that, were he to rise into their ranks and be accepted, he would no longer despise them, would find them ideal company. He despises the insiders only because he isn’t one of them; being excluded is what feeds his hatred.

  Since childhood, he’s been a superb hater. He hated his father for the many beatings and hated his indifferent mother for raising no objection to them. His hatred had festered into pure black rancor until, at fifteen, he was big enough and furious enough to pay his old man back with interest and knock some remorse into his mother, as well, before walking out on them forever.

  Because they had no interest in teaching him anything at all, other than fearful obedience, they no doubt still have no awareness that by their cruelty they taught him the most important of all life lessons: Happiness depends on acquiring as much power as possible, power in all its forms—physical strength, superior knowledge, money and more money, political control over others.

  His parents are ignorant alcoholics full of class resentment, but in essence they are alike to the Arcadian poachers who have thus far thwarted Ivan’s ascent in the revolution. He hates them all.

  Anyway, he has a plan, and it’s a good one that could elevate him into the hierarchy where he belongs.

  The motel is not a place where he can surprise her, overpower her, take custody of her, and put her through a hard interrogation without drawing unwanted attention. If he is patient, a better opportunity will present itself.

  If he can break her on his own, learn where the boy is…he can present both mother and child to the revolution as a single package and in such a way that credit is given where it is due.

  The cargo area of the
Range Rover is stocked with surveillance gear, from which he selects a transponder with a lithium battery. It’s the size of a pack of cigarettes. After programming the unit’s identifier code into his GPS, he crosses the street to the motel.

  The best way to accomplish a task like this is boldly, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world to stoop beside a stranger’s car and attach a transponder. The back of this particular unit features a plastic bubble containing a powerful epoxy. With a penknife, Ivan slits the bubble, reaches between the tire and the rear quarter panel, and presses the transponder to the wheel well. The epoxy sets in ten seconds. Because it is an adhesive used to attach heat-dispersing tiles to space shuttles, there is no chance it will be dislodged by any patch of rough road or in a collision.

  If people in the passing vehicles notice Ivan at work, they aren’t curious. He crosses the street and returns to the Range Rover without incident.

  However, fewer than ten minutes pass before the door of Room 8 opens and the woman exits, carrying luggage. She needs two trips to load the Scout. She is clearly agitated and in a hurry.

  He is sure, now beyond all doubt, that she is Jane Hawk.

  He suspects she has somehow learned what has happened to Gavin and Jessica Washington, the two guardians of her boy, who have been killed in Borrego Springs.

  He watches her drive away from the motel and does not at once pursue her. He doesn’t need to keep her in sight in order to tail her. The transponder that he attached to her Explorer is represented as a blinking red signifier on the screen of the Range Rover GPS.

  Ivan waits a few minutes before reversing out of the pergola. He turns left into the street. Jane Hawk is headed west on Highway 50, toward Sacramento and points beyond, and so is Ivan Petro.

  To Vito and Lynn,

  with love, for all the laughter