by Dean Koontz
Farther up the aisle, the storyteller reached the exit door and disappeared into the debarkation umbilical.
Joe was afraid of losing his stalker, but it was imperative that they continue to believe that he was unaware of them.
Barbara Christman was in terrible danger. First thing, he had to find a phone and warn her.
Faking patience and boredom, he shuffled forward with the other passengers. In the umbilical, which was much wider than the aisle in the airplane, he finally slipped past them without appearing to be alarmed or in a hurry. He didn’t realize that he was holding his breath until he exhaled hard with relief when he spotted his quarry ahead of him.
The huge terminal was busy. At the gates, the ranks of chairs were filled with passengers waiting to catch a late-afternoon flight in the fast-fading hours of the weekend. Chattering, laughing, arguing, brooding in silence, shuffling-striding-strolling-limping-ambling, arriving passengers poured out of other gates and along the concourse. There were singles, couples, entire families, blacks and whites and Asians and Latinos and four towering Samoan men, all with black porkpie hats, beautiful sloe-eyed women, willow graceful in their turquoise or ruby or sapphire saris, others in chadors and others in jeans, men in business suits, men in shorts and bright polo shirts, four young Hasidic Jews arguing (but joyfully) over the most mystical of all documents (a Los Angeles freeway map), uniformed soldiers, giggling children and shrieking children and two placid octogenarians in wheelchairs, a pair of tall Arab princes in akals and kaffiyehs and flowing djellabas, preceded by fierce bodyguards and trailed by retinues, beacon-red tourists drifting homeward on the astringent fumes of medicated sunburn lotion, pale tourists arriving with the dampish smell of cloudy country clinging to them—and, like a white boat strangely serene in a typhoon, the man in the Panama hat, sailing imperiously through the polygenic sea.
As far as Joe was concerned, they might all be stage dressing, every one of them an agent of Teknologik or of institutions unknown, all watching him surreptitiously, snapping photographs of him with trick cameras concealed in their purses and attaché cases and tote bags, all conferring by hidden microphones as to whether he should be permitted to proceed or be gunned down on the spot.
He had never before felt so alone in a crowd.
Dreading what might happen—might even now be happening—to Barbara, he tried to keep the storyteller in sight while also searching for a telephone.
FOUR
PALE FIRE
13
The public telephone, one in a cluster of four, was not in a booth, but the wings of a sound shield provided a small measure of privacy.
As he entered Barbara’s Colorado Springs number on the keypad, Joe ground his teeth together as though he could bite off the noise of the crowded terminal and chew it into a silence that would allow him to concentrate. He needed to think through what he would say to her, but he had neither the time nor the solitude to craft the ideal speech, and he was afraid of committing a blunder that would pitch her deeper into trouble.
Even if her phone had not been tapped the previous evening, it was surely being monitored now, following his visit to her. His task was to warn her of the danger while simultaneously convincing the eavesdroppers that she had never broken the pledge of silence that would keep her and Denny safe.
As the telephone began to ring in Colorado, Joe glanced toward the storyteller, who had taken up a position farther along—and on the opposite side of—the concourse. He was standing outside the entrance to an airport newsstand and gift shop, nervously adjusting his Panama hat, and conversing with a Hispanic man in tan chinos, a green madras shirt, and a Dodgers cap.
Through the screen of passing travelers, Joe pretended not to watch the two men while they pretended, less convincingly, not to watch him. They were less circumspect than they should have been, because they were overconfident. Although they might give him credit for being industrious and clever, they thought that he was basically a jerk civilian in fast-running water way over his head.
He was exactly what they thought him to be, of course, but he hoped he was also more than they believed. A man driven by paternal love—and therefore dangerous. A man with a passion for justice that was alien to their world of situational ethics, in which the only morals were the morals of convenience.
Barbara answered the phone on the fifth ring, just as Joe was beginning to despair.
“It’s me, Joe Carpenter,” he said.
“I was just—”
Before Barbara could say anything that might reveal the extent of the revelations she’d made to him, Joe said, “Listen, I wanted to thank you again for taking me to the crash site. It wasn’t easy, but it was something I had to do, had to see, if I was ever going to have any peace. I’m sorry if I badgered you about what really happened to that airplane. I was a little crazy, I guess. A couple of odd things have happened lately, and I just let my imagination run wild. You were right when you said most of the time things are exactly what they appear to be. It’s just hard to accept that you can lose your family to anything as stupid as an accident, mechanical failure, human error, whatever. You feel like it just has to be a lot more significant than an accident because…well, because they were so significant to you. You know? You think there have to be villains somewhere, that it can’t be just fate, because God wouldn’t allow this to happen. But you started me thinking when you said the only place there’s always villains is in the movies. If I’m going to get over this, I’m going to have to accept that these things just happen, that no one’s to blame. Life is risk, right? God does let innocent people die, lets children die. It’s that simple.”
Joe was tense, waiting to hear what she would say, whether she had understood the urgent message that he was striving to convey so indirectly.
After a brief hesitation, Barbara said, “I hope you find peace, Joe, I really do. It took a lot of guts for you to go out there, right to the impact site. And it takes guts to face the fact that there’s no one to blame in the end. As long as you’re stuck in the idea that there’s someone who’s guilty of something, someone who’s got to be brought to justice…well, then you’re full of vengeance, and you’re not healing.”
She understood.
Joe closed his eyes and tried to gather his unraveled nerves into a tight bundle again.
He said, “It’s just…we live in such weird times. It’s easy to believe in vast conspiracies.”
“Easier than facing hard truths. Your real argument isn’t with the pilots or the maintenance crew. It isn’t with the air-traffic controllers or with the people who built the airplane. Your real argument’s with God.”
“Which I can’t win,” he said, opening his eyes.
In front of the newsstand, the storyteller and the Dodgers fan finished their conversation. The storyteller departed.
“We’re not supposed to understand why,” Barbara said. “We just have to have faith that there’s a reason. If you can learn to accept that, then you really might find peace. You’re a very nice man, Joe. You don’t deserve to be in such torment. I’ll be praying for you.”
“Thanks, Barbara. Thanks for everything.”
“Good luck, Joe.”
He almost wished her good luck as well, but those two words might be a tip-off to whoever was listening.
Instead, he said, “Good-bye.”
Still hummingbird tense, he hung up.
Simply by going to Colorado and knocking on Barbara’s door, he had put her, her son, and her son’s entire family in terrible jeopardy—although he’d had no way of knowing this would be the consequence of his visit. Anything might happen to her now—or nothing—and Joe felt a chill of blame coil around his heart.
On the other hand, by going to Colorado, he had learned that Nina was miraculously alive. He was willing to take the moral responsibility for a hundred deaths in return for the mere hope of seeing her again.
He was aware of how monstrous it was to regard the life of his daugh
ter as more precious than the lives of any hundred strangers—two hundred, a thousand. He didn’t care. He would kill to save her, if that was the extreme to which he was driven. Kill anyone who got in his way. Any number.
Wasn’t it the human dilemma to dream of being part of the larger community but, in the face of everlasting death, always to operate on personal and family imperatives? And he was, after all, too human.
Joe left the public telephones and followed the concourse toward the exit. As he reached the head of the escalators, he contrived to glance back.
The Dodgers fan followed at a discreet distance, well disguised by the ordinariness of his dress and demeanor. He wove himself into the crowd so skillfully that he was no more evident than any single thread in a coat of many colors.
Down the escalator and through the lower floor of the terminal, Joe did not look back again. Either the Dodgers fan would be there or he would have handed Joe over to another agent, as the storyteller had done.
Given their formidable resources, they would have a substantial contingent of operatives at the airport. He could never escape them here.
He had exactly an hour until he had to meet Demi, who he hoped would take him to Rose Tucker. If he didn’t make the rendezvous in time, he had no way to reestablish contact with the woman.
His wristwatch seemed to be ticking as loudly as a grandfather clock.
Tortured faces melted into the mutant forms of strange animals and nightmare landscapes in the Rorschach stains on the walls of the vast, drab concrete parking structure. Engine noise from cars in other aisles, on other levels, echoed like a Grendel grumble through these man-made caverns.
His Honda was where he’d left it.
Although most of the vehicles in the garage were cars, three vans—none white—an old Volkswagen minibus with curtained windows, and a pickup truck with a camper shell were parked near enough to him to serve as surveillance posts. He didn’t give any of them a second look.
He opened the car trunk, and using his body to block the view of any onlooker, he quickly checked the spare-tire well for the money. He had taken two thousand to Colorado, but he had left the bulk of his funds in the Honda. He was afraid the bank’s manila envelope with the brass clasp would be gone, but it was where he’d left it.
He slipped the envelope under the waistband of his jeans. He considered taking the small suitcase as well, but if he transferred it to the front seat, the people watching him would not be suckered by the little drama he had planned for them.
In the driver’s seat, he took the envelope out of his waistband, opened it, and tucked the packets of hundred-dollar bills in the various pockets of his corduroy jacket. He folded the empty envelope and put it in the console box.
When he backed out of the parking space and drove away, none of the suspect vehicles followed him immediately. They didn’t need to be quick. Hidden somewhere on the Honda, another transponder was sending the surveillance team a signal that made constant visual contact unnecessary.
He drove down three levels to the exit. Departing vehicles were lined up at the cashiers’ booths.
As he inched forward, he repeatedly checked his rearview mirror. Just as he reached the cashier, he saw the pickup with the camper shell pull into line six cars behind him.
Driving away from the airport, he held his speed slightly below the legal limit and made no effort to beat traffic lights as they turned yellow ahead of him. He didn’t want to put too much distance between himself and his pursuers.
Preferring surface streets rather than the freeways, he headed toward the west side of the city. Block by block through a seedy commercial district, he searched for a setup that would serve his purposes.
The summer day was warm and clear, and the sunshine was diffused in matching parabolic rainbow arcs across the dirty windshield. The soapy washer spray and the wipers cleared the glass somewhat but not sufficiently.
Squinting through the glare, Joe almost failed to give the used-car dealership due consideration. Gem Fittich Auto Sales. Sunday was a car-shopping day, and the lot was open, though perhaps not for long. Realizing that this was precisely what he needed, he pulled to the right-hand curb and stopped half a block past the place.
He was in front of a transmission-repair shop. The business was housed in a badly maintained stucco and corrugated-steel building that appeared to have been blown together by a capricious tornado, using parts of several other structures that it had previously torn asunder. Fortunately, the shop was closed; he didn’t want any good-Samaritan mechanics coming to his rescue.
He shut off the engine and got out of the Honda.
The pickup with the camper shell was not yet within sight on the street behind him.
He hurried to the front of the car and opened the hood.
The Honda was of no use to him anymore. This time they would have concealed the transponder so well that he would need hours to find it. He couldn’t drive it to Westwood and lead them to Rose, but he couldn’t simply abandon it, either, because then they would know that he was onto them.
He needed to disable the Honda in such a fashion that it would appear to be not sabotage but genuine mechanical failure. Eventually the people following him would open the hood, and if they spotted missing spark plugs or a disconnected distributor cap, they would know that they had been tricked.
Then Barbara Christman would be in deeper trouble than ever. They would realize that Joe had recognized the storyteller on the airplane, that he knew they’d been following him in Colorado—and that everything he’d said to Barbara on the phone had been designed to warn her and to convince them that she had not told him anything important when, in fact, she had told him everything.
He carefully unplugged the ignition control module but left it sitting loosely in its case. A casual inspection would not reveal that it was disengaged. Even if later they searched until they found the problem, they were more likely to assume that the ICM had worked loose on its own rather than that Joe had fiddled with it. At least they would be left with the element of doubt, affording Barbara some protection.
The pickup with the camper shell drove past him.
He didn’t look directly at the truck but recognized it from the corner of his eye.
For a minute or two he pretended to study various things in the engine compartment. Poking this. Wiggling that. Scratching his head.
Leaving the hood up, he got behind the wheel again and tried to start the Honda, but of course he had no luck.
He got out of the car and went to look at the engine again.
Peripherally, he saw that the camper truck had turned off the street at the end of the block. It had stopped in the shallow parking area in front of an empty industrial building that featured a real-estate agency’s large For Sale sign on the front.
He studied the engine another minute, cursing it with energy and color, just in case they had directional microphones trained on him.
Finally he slammed the hood and looked worriedly at his watch. He stood indecisively for a moment. Consulted his watch again. He said, “Shit.”
He walked back the street in the direction he had come. When he arrived at the used-car lot, he hesitated for effect, then walked directly to the sales office.
Gem Fittich Auto Sales operated under numerous crisscrossing stringers of yellow and white and red plastic pennants faded by a summer of sun. In the breeze, they snapped like the flapping wings of a perpetually hovering flock of buzzards over more than thirty cars that ranged from good stock to steel carrion.
The office was in a small prefab building painted yellow with red trim. Through the large picture window, Joe could see a man lounging in a spring-back chair, watching a small television, loafer-clad feet propped on a desk.
As he climbed the two steps and went through the open doorway, he heard a sportscaster doing color commentary on a baseball game.
The building consisted of a single large room with a rest room in one corner, visible beyond the h
alf-open door. The two desks, the four chairs, and the bank of metal file cabinets were cheap, but everything was clean and neatly kept.
Joe had been hoping for dust, clutter, and a sense of quiet desperation.
The fortyish salesman was cheery-looking, sandy-haired, wearing tan cotton slacks and a yellow polo shirt. He swung his feet off the desk, got up from his chair, and offered his hand. “Howdy! Didn’t hear you drive up. I’m Gem Fittich.”
Shaking his hand, Joe said, “Joe Carpenter. I need a car.”
“You came to the right place.” Fittich reached toward the portable television that stood on his desk.
“No, that’s okay, leave it on,” Joe said.
“You’re a fan, you might not want to see this one. They’re getting their butts kicked.”
Right now the transmission-repair shop next door blocked them from the surveillance team. If the camper truck appeared across the street, however, as Joe more than half expected, and if directional microphones were trained on the big picture window, the audio from the baseball game might have to be turned up to foil the listeners.
Positioning himself so he could talk to Fittich and look past him to the sales lot and the street, Joe said, “What’s the cheapest set of wheels you’ve got ready to roll?”
“Once you consider my prices, you’re going to realize you can get plenty of value without having to settle for—”
“Here’s the deal,” Joe said, withdrawing packets of hundred-dollar bills from a jacket pocket. “Depending on how it performs on a test drive, I’ll buy the cheapest car you have on the lot right now, one hundred percent cash money, no guarantee required.”
Fittich liked the look of the cash. “Well, Joe, I’ve got this Subaru, she’s a long road from the factory, but she’s still got life in her. No air conditioning but radio and—”
“How much?”
“Well, now, I’ve done some work on her, have her tagged at twenty-one hundred fifty, but I’ll let you have her for nineteen seventy-five. She—”
Joe considered offering less, but every minute counted, and considering what he was going to ask of Fittich, he decided that he wasn’t in a position to bargain. He interrupted the salesman to say, “I’ll take it.”
After a disappointingly slow day in the iron-horse trade, Gem Fittich was clearly torn between pleasure at the prospect of a sale and uneasiness at the way in which they had arrived at terms. He smelled trouble. “You don’t want to take a test drive?”
Putting two thousand in cash on Fittich’s desk, Joe said, “That is exactly what I want to do. Alone.”
Across the street, a tall man appeared on foot, coming from the direction in which the camper truck was parked. He stood in the shade of a bus-stop shelter. If he’d sat on the shelter bench, his view of the sales office would have been hampered by the merchandise parked in front of it.
“Alone?” Fittich asked, puzzled.
“You’ve got the whole purchase price there on the desk,” Joe said. From his wallet, he withdrew his driver’s license and handed it to Fittich. “I see you have a Xerox. Make a copy of my license.”
The guy at the bus stop was wearing a short-sleeve shirt and slacks, and he wasn’t carrying anything. Therefore, he wasn’t equipped with a high-power, long-range listening device; he was just keeping watch.
Fittich followed the direction of Joe’s gaze and said, “What trouble am I getting into here?”
Joe met the salesman’s eyes. “None. You’re clear. You’re just doing business.”
“Why’s that fella at the bus stop interest you?”
“He doesn’t. He’s just a guy.”
Fittich wasn’t deceived. “If what’s actually happening here is a purchase, not just a test drive, then there’re state forms we have to fill out, sales tax to be collected, legal procedures.”
“But it’s just a test drive,” Joe said.
He checked his wristwatch. He wasn’t pretending to be worried about the hour now; he was genuinely concerned.
“All right, look, Mr. Fittich, no more bullshit. I don’t have time. This is going to be even better for you than a sale, because here’s what’s going to happen. You take that money and stick it in the back of a desk drawer. Nobody ever has to know I gave it to you. I’ll drive the Subaru to where I have to go, which is only someplace on the West Side. I’d take my own car, but they’ve got a tracking device on it, and I don’t want to be followed. I’ll abandon the Subaru in a safe area and call you by tomorrow to let you know where it is. You bring it back, and all that’s happened is you’ve rented your cheapest car for one day for two thousand bucks tax free. The worst that happens is I don’t call. You’ve still got the money—and a theft write-off.”
Fittich turned the driver’s license over and over in his hand. “Is somebody going to ask me why I’d let you make a test drive alone even with a copy of your license?”
“The guy looked honest to me,” Joe said, feeding Fittich the lines he could use. “It was his picture on the license. And I just couldn’t leave, ’cause I expected a call from a hot prospect who came in earlier and might buy the best piece of iron I have on the lot. Didn’t want to risk missing that call.”
