Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  Parker walked along the veranda, studying the front windows, being nonchalant, acting as if he belonged there, though the property was so shrouded by trees and lush landscaping that he could not be spotted easily from the street—or from Essie Craw’s windows. The drapes were shut, preventing a glimpse of the interior. He expected to see the telltale electricity-conducting tape of an alarm system on the glass. But there was no tape and no other indication of electronic security.

  He stepped off the end of the veranda and went around the western side of the house, where the morning sun had not shrunk the long, deep shadows of the pines. He tried two windows there. They were locked.

  In back of the house were more shrubs, flowers, and a large brick patio with a lattice cover, outdoor wet-bar, expensive lawn furniture.

  He used his coat-protected elbow to smash in a small pane on one of the French doors. He unlocked the door and went inside, pushing through the drapes into a tile-floored family room.

  He stood very still, listening. The house was silent.

  It would have been uncomfortably dark if the family room had not opened onto a breakfast area and the breakfast area onto the kitchen, where light entered through the glass in that uncurtained door to the patio. Parker moved past a fireplace, billiards table—and froze when he spotted the motion-detection alarm unit on the wall. He recognized it from when he had investigated security systems for his Laguna house. He was about to flee when he recalled that a small red light should have been visible on the unit if it was in operation. The bulb was there—but dark. Apparently the system had not been activated when the Salcoes had left.

  The kitchen was roomy, with the best appliances. Beyond that was a serving pantry, then the dining room. The light from the kitchen did not reach that far, so he decided to risk turning on lights as he went.

  In the living room, he stood very still again, listening.

  Nothing. The silence was deep and heavy, as in a tomb.

  When Brendan Cronin entered the Blocks’ kitchen after rising late and taking a long hot shower, he found little Marcie coloring moons and murmuring eerily to herself. He thought of how he had mended Emmeline Halbourg with his hands, and he wondered if he could cure Marcie’s psychological obsession by the application of that same psychic power. But he dared not try. Not until he learned to control his wild talent, for he might do irreparable harm to the girl’s mind.

  Jack and Jorja were finishing omelets and toast, and they greeted him warmly. Jorja wanted to make breakfast for Brendan, too, but he declined. He only wanted a cup of coffee, black and strong.

  As Jack ate, he examined four handguns that were lying on the table beside his plate. Two of them were Ernie’s. Jack had brought the other two with him from the East. Neither Brendan nor anyone else referred to the firearms, for they knew their enemy might be listening right now. No point revealing the size of their arsenal.

  The guns made Brendan nervous. Maybe because he had a prescient feeling that the weapons would be used repeatedly before day’s end.

  His characteristic optimism had left him, largely because he had not dreamed last night. He’d had his first uninterrupted sleep in weeks, but for him that was no improvement. Unlike the others, Brendan had been having a good dream every night, and it had given him hope. Now the dream was gone, and the loss made him edgy.

  “I thought it would be snowing by now,” he said as he sat down at the table with a cup of coffee.

  “Soon,” Jack said.

  The sky looked like a great slab of dark-gray granite.

  Ned and Sandy Sarver, serving as the second team of outriders, had driven into Elko to rendezvous with Jack, Jorja, and Brendan at the Arco Mini-Mart at four in the morning, then had cruised around town until seven-thirty, by which time some of those back at the Tranquility would have set out on their tasks for the day. They returned to the motel at eight o’clock, ate a quick breakfast, and went back to bed to get a few more hours of rest in order to cope with the busy day ahead.

  Ned woke after little more than two hours, but he did not get out of bed. He lay in the dimness of the motel room for a while, watching Sandy sleep. The love he felt for her was deep and smooth and flowing like a great river that could bear them both away to better places and times beyond all the worries of the world.

  Ned wished he was as good a talker as he was a fixer. Sometimes he worried that he had never been able to tell her exactly how he felt about her. But when he tried to put his sentiments into words, he either became tongue-tied or heard himself expressing his emotions in hopelessly inarticulate sentences and leaden images. It was good to be a fixer, with the talent to repair everything from broken toasters to broken cars to broken people. Yet sometimes, Ned would have traded all his mending skills for the ability to compose and speak one perfect sentence which would convey his deepest feelings for her.

  Now, watching her, he realized that she was no longer sleeping. “Playing possum?” he asked.

  She opened her eyes and smiled. “I was scared, the way you were watching me, that I was going to get eaten alive, so I played possum.”

  “You look good enough to eat; that’s for sure.”

  She threw aside the covers and, naked, opened her arms to him. They fell at once into the familiar silken rhythms of love-making at which they had become so sensuously adept during the past year of her sexual awakening.

  In the afterglow, as they lay side by side, holding hands, Sandy said, “Oh, Ned, I must be the happiest woman on earth. Since I met you down in Arizona all those years ago, since you took me under your wing, you’ve made me very happy, Ned. In fact, I’m so crazy-happy now that if God struck me dead this minute, I wouldn’t complain.”

  “Don’t say that,” he told her sharply. Rising up on one elbow, leaning over her, looking down at her, he said, “I don’t like you saying that. It makes me ... superstitious. All this trouble we’re in—it’s possible some of us will die. So I don’t want you tempting fate. I don’t want you saying things like that.”

  “Ned, you’re about the least superstitious man I know.”

  “Yeah, well, I feel different about this. I don’t want you saying you’re so happy you wouldn’t mind dying, nothing like that. Understand? I don’t want you even thinking it.”

  He slipped his arms around her again, pulling her very tightly against him, needing to feel the throb of life within her. He held her so close that after a while he could no longer detect the strong and regular stroking of her heart, which was only because it had become synchronized with—and lost in—his own beat.

  In the Salcoe family’s Monterey house, Parker Faine was looking primarily for two things, either of which would fulfill his obligation to Dom. First, he hoped to find something to prove they had actually gone to Napa-Sonoma: If he found a brochure for a hotel, he could call and confirm that the Salcoes had checked in safely; or if they went to the wine country regularly, perhaps an address book would contain the telephone number of the place where they stayed. But he half-expected to find the other thing instead: overturned furniture, bloodstains, or other evidence that the Salcoes had been taken against their will.

  Of course, Dom had only asked him to come talk with these people. He would be appalled to know that Parker had gone to these illegal lengths when the Salcoes had been un-locatable. But Parker never did anything by halves, and he was enjoying himself even though his heart had begun to pound and his throat had clutched up a bit.

  Beyond the living room was a library. Beyond that, a small music room contained a piano, music stands, chairs, two clarinet cases, and a ballet exercise bar. Evidently, the twins liked music and dance.

  Parker found nothing amiss on the first floor, so he slowly climbed the stairs, staying in the runner of plush carpet between oak inlays. The light from the first floor reached just to the top step. Above, the second-floor hallway was dark.

  He stopped on the landing.

  Stillness.

  His hands were clammy.

 
He did not understand why he was clutching up. Maybe instinct. It might be wise to pay attention to his more primitive senses. But if anyone had wanted to ambush him, there had been plenty of places on the first floor ideal for the purpose, yet the rooms had been deserted.

  He continued upward, and when he reached the second-floor hallway, he finally heard something. It was a cross between a beep-sound and a blip-sound, and it came from rooms on both ends of the hall. For a moment he thought the alarm system was about to go off, after all, but an alarm would have been a thousand times louder than these beep-blips. The sounds came in counterpointed, rhythmic patterns.

  He found a switch at the head of the stairs and snapped on the overhead lights in the hall. Standing motionless once more, he listened for noises other than the curious beep-blips. He heard none. There was something familiar about the sound, but it eluded him.

  His curiosity was greater than his fear. He had always been compelled by a chronic curiosity, with frequent acute attacks of same, and if he had not allowed it to drive him in the past, he’d never have become a successful painter. Curiosity was the heart of creativity. Therefore, he looked both ways along the hall, then turned right and walked cautiously toward one source of the beep-blips.

  At the end of the hallway, there were two distinct sets of beeping sounds, each with a slightly different rhythm, both coming from a dark room where the door was three-quarters shut. Poised to flee, he pushed the door all the way open. Nothing leaped at him out of the darkness. The beeping became louder, but only because the door was out of the way now. He saw that the room was not entirely dark. On the far wall, thin ribbons of pale gray light outlined drapes that were drawn across a very large window or perhaps a pair of balcony doors; the Salcoes’ Southern Colonial had lots of balconies. In addition, around the corner from the doorway, out of sight, were two sources of eerie soft green light that did little to dispel the gloom.

  Parker eased forward, clicked the light switch, entered the room, saw the Salcoe twins, and thought for an instant that they were dead. They were lying on their backs in a queen-sized bed, covers drawn up to their shoulders, unmoving, eyes open. Then Parker realized that the beeping and the green light came from EEG and EKG monitors to which both girls were connected, and he saw the IV racks trailing lines to spikes inserted in their arms, so he knew they were not dead but merely in the process of being brainwashed. The chamber had none of the quality of a teenaged girl’s room; from the lack of personal mementos or any stamp of individuality, he assumed it was a guest room and that the girls had been put here in a single bed simply to make it easier to monitor them.

  But where were their captors and tormentors? Were the mind-control experts so certain of the effectiveness of their drugs and other devices that they could leave the family alone and dash out for a Big Mac and fries at McDonald’s? Was there no risk at all that one of the Salcoes, in a moment of lucidity, might tear out his IV line, rise up, and flee?

  Parker went to the nearest girl, looked into her blank eyes. For a few seconds she peered up unblinking, then suddenly blinked furiously—ten, twenty, thirty times—then stared unblinking again. She did not see Parker. He waved a hand across her eyes and got no reaction.

  He saw that she was wearing a pair of earphones connected to a tape recorder that lay on the pillow beside her head. He leaned close to her, lifted one earphone an inch, and listened to a soft, melodic, and very soothing voice, a woman’s voice: “On Monday morning, I slept in late. It’s a wonderful hotel for sleeping late because the staff is so quiet, so respectful. It’s actually a country club as well as a hotel, so it’s not like other places, where maids make a racket in the halls as soon as the sun rises. Oh, don’t you just love the wine country! I’d like to live there someday. Anyway, after we finally got up, Chrissie and I took a long walk around the grounds, sort of hoping we’d run into some neat boys, but we couldn’t find any....” The hypnotic rhythms of the woman’s voice spooked Parker. He put the earphones back in place.

  Evidently, one or more of the Salcoes had remembered what they had experienced at the Tranquility Motel the summer before last. So those memories had again been repressed. Now to cover the time span of this current brainwashing session, new false memories were being implanted, a, process that included the repeated playing of a tape recording that undoubtedly had subliminal as well as audible messages to impart.

  Dom had explained some of it to Parker on the telephone, Saturday and Sunday nights. But Parker had not fully appreciated the hideousness of the conspiracy until he heard that insidious whisper in the Salcoe girl’s ear.

  He moved to the foot of the bed and studied the other twin, whose eyes also alternated between blinkless stares and abrupt, machine-gun bursts of blinks. He wondered if he would do any physical or mental harm to them if he pulled out their IV lines, disconnected them from the machines, and moved them out of the house before their captors returned. Better to find a phone, call the police—

  How long they were watching him he did not know, but suddenly he was aware that he and the twins were not alone. He jumped and whirled toward the door, where two men had entered the room. They were wearing dark slacks, white shirts with the sleeves rolled up and the collars unbuttoned, neckties loosened and askew. At the doorway behind them was another man, bespectacled and in a suit with his tie in place. They had to be government agents, for no one else would bother to wear business clothes while engaged upon activities of such a dubious nature.

  One of them said, “And who the fuck are you?”

  Parker did not attempt to jive them, did not foolishly claim his rights as a U.S. citizen, did not bother to say anything at all. He just took three running steps toward the drawn drapes, praying that a big window or sliding-glass balcony door lay beyond them, that it would shatter on impact, that the drapes would protect him from serious cuts, and that he would be outside and gone before they knew what happened. If the drapes were a lot wider than the window, covering more blank wall than glass, he was in big trouble. Behind him, the men shouted in surprise just as he hit the drapes, for they’d obviously believed they’d trapped him. He went through the material with the unstoppable power of a locomotive. The impact was tremendous, sending a devastating shock across his shoulder and through his chest, but something gave way with a crack and a screech and a crash of glass, and he was through into daylight, vaguely aware that the doors had been French rather than sliding panels and that he had been lucky the lock was flimsy.

  He found himself on a second-floor balcony with a pair of redwood lounge chairs and a glass-topped table, over which he fell. Even as he was going down on top of chairs, banging knees and barking shins, he was already coming up again, up and over the balcony rail, leaping out into space, praying he would not land in a particularly woody shrub and be castrated by a sharp, sturdy branch. He fell only twelve feet onto bare lawn, jarring his other shoulder and his back but breaking no bones. He rolled, scrambled to his feet, and ran.

  Suddenly, in front of his eyes, foliage snapped-fluttered-shredded, and he didn’t know what was happening, and then as he continued to run, pieces of bark exploded off a tree, and he realized they were shooting at him. He heard no gunfire. Silencer-equipped weapons. He zigzagged toward the perimeter of the property, fell in an azalea bed, scrambled up, ran on, reached a hedge, threw himself over it, and kept on running.

  They had been ready to kill him to stop him from spreading the news of what he had seen in the Salcoe house. Right now, they were probably hastily moving—or killing—the Salcoes. If he found a phone and called the police, and if the killers were agents of the U.S. government, whose side would the police be on? And who would they believe? One eccentric and rather curiously dressed artist with a woolly beard and flyaway hair? Or three neatly attired FBI men claiming they were in the Salcoe house on a legitimate stakeout of some kind, and that Parker Faine was, in fact, the felon they had attempted to arrest. If they demanded custody of him, would the police cooperate?


  Jesus.

  He ran. Abandoning the Tempo, he sprinted down the sloped wall of a shallow glen, along the rocky course of a narrow brook, between trees, through underbrush, up another wall of the same glen, into someone’s back yard, across that lawn and into another yard, alongside a house, out into a street, from that street to another. He slowed to a fast walk to avoid drawing attention to himself, but he continued to follow a twisty route away from the Salcoe house.

  He knew what he had to do. The horror he had just seen had made the extremity of Dom’s plight clearer than ever. Parker had known his friend was in danger, deep in a conspiracy of monumental proportions, but knowing it in his mind was not the same as knowing it in his guts. There was nothing for him to do but go to Elko County. Dom Corvaisis was his friend, perhaps his best friend, and this was what friends did for each other: shared their trouble, fought back the darkness together. He could walk away; go back to Laguna Beach to continue work on the painting that he had begun yesterday. But if he chose that course, he would never like himself very much again—which would be an intolerable circumstance, for he had always liked himself immensely!

  He had to find a ride back to the Monterey Airport, catch a flight to San Francisco International, and head east from there toward Nevada. He was not concerned that the men in the Salcoes’ house would be looking for him at the airport. The only words any of them had spoken in his presence were: “And who the fuck are you?” If they did not know who he was, they would most likely figure he was a local. The keys to the Tempo had a rental-company tag on them, but they were in his pocket. In an hour or two, of course, the bad guys would trace the car to the airport, but by then he should have taken off for San Francisco.

  He kept walking. On a quiet residential street he saw a young man, about nineteen or twenty, in the driveway of a more modest house than the Salcoes’, carefully scrubbing the whitewalls on the tires of a meticulously restored, banana-yellow, 1958 Plymouth Fury, one of those long jobs with a plenitude of grille and big sharky fins. The kid had a slicked-back ducktail haircut to match the era of his vehicle. Parker went up to him and said, “Listen, my car broke down, and I’ve got to get to the airport. I’m in a big hurry, so would you drive me out there for fifty bucks?”

  The kid knew how to hurry. If he had not been a superb driver, he would have fishtailed out of control and spun them off the road into trees or ditches on a half-dozen tight turns, for he got all possible speed out of the big Fury. After they came through the third sharp turn alive, Parker knew he was in good hands, and he finally relaxed a bit.

  At the airport, he bought a ticket for one of two remaining seats on a West Air flight leaving for San Francisco in ten minutes. He boarded the plane, half-expecting it to be halted by federal agents before it could take off. But soon they were airborne, and he could worry about something else: getting another flight from San Francisco to Reno before they tracked him that far.

  Jack Twist went through the Blocks’ apartment from north-to west- to south- to east-facing windows, surveying the vast landscape for signs of the enemy’s observation post—or posts. At least one surveillance team would be watching the motel and diner, and no matter how well concealed they were, he had a device that would pinpoint their location.

  He’d brought it from New York with the other gear—an instrument the armed forces called the HS101 Heat Analyzer. It was shaped like a sleek futuristic raygun from the movies, with a single two-inch-diameter lens instead of a barrel. You held it by the butt and looked through the eyepiece as if peering into a telescope. Moving the viewfinder across the landscape, you saw two things: an ordinary magnified image of the terrain, and an overlaid representation of heat sources within that terrain. Plants, animals, and sun-baked rocks radiated heat, but thanks to microchip technology, the HS101’s computer could differentiate among types of thermal radiation and screen out most natural background sources. The device would show only heat from living sources larger than fifty pounds: animals bigger than house-dogs and human beings. Even if they were out there in insulated ski suits that trapped a lot of body heat, enough would escape their garments to give him a fix on them.

  Jack spent a considerable length of time studying the land north of the motel, through which he had approached the place last night, but finally he decided no one was watching from that direction, and he moved to the west-facing windows in other rooms. The west also looked clear, so he went next to the windows on the south side of the apartment.

  Marcie had colored the last moon in her album, and when Jack set out with the HS101 to look for surveillance teams, she came with him, staying close by his side. Maybe she had taken a liking to him because he’d spent hours talking to her in spite of her failure to respond. Or maybe she was scared of something and felt safer in his presence. Or another reason too strange to imagine. He could do nothing for her except keep talking softly to her as she accompanied him.

  Jorja followed along as well, and though she did not interrupt with questions, she was considerably more distracting than her daughter. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, but more importantly he liked her a lot. He thought she liked him, too, although he didn’t suppose she was attracted to him, not in the man-woman sense. After all, what would a woman like her see in a guy like him? He was an admitted criminal, and he had a face like an old battered shoe, not to mention one cast eye. But they could be friends, at least, and that was nice.

  At the living room windows, he finally spotted what he was seeking: points of body heat out there in the cold barrens. Across the top of the image that filled the lens—Nevada plains and overlaid heat patterns—came a digital readout of data that told him there were two sources of heat, that they were due south of his position, and that they were approximately four-tenths of a mile away. That information was followed by numerals that represented an estimation of the size of each source’s radiant surface, which told him he had found two men. He switched off the HS101’s heat-analysis function and turned up the magnification, using the device as a simple telescope, zeroing in on the area in which the heat had been detected. He had to search for a couple of minutes, for they were wearing camouflage suits.

  “Bingo,” he said at last.

  Jorja did not ask what he saw, for she had learned well the lesson he had taught them last night: Everything spoken in the apartment was sucked directly into the enemy’s electronic ears.

  Out there on the barrens, the two observers were prone on the cold ground. Jack saw that one man had a pair of binoculars. But the guy was not using the glasses at the moment, so he was not aware of Jack watching him from the window.

  He moved to the east windows and surveyed that landscape, as well, but it was uninhabited. They were being watched only from the south, which the enemy figured was sufficient because the front of the motel and the only road leading to it could be seen from that single post.

  They were underestimating Jack. They knew his background, knew that he was good, but they didn’t realize how good.

  At one-forty, the first snowflakes fell. For a while they came down only as scattered flurries, with no particular force.

  At two o’clock, when Dom and Ernie returned from their scouting trip around the perimeter of the Thunder Hill Depository, Jack said, “You know, Ernie, when the storm really hits later, there might be some people on the interstate who’ll see our wheels out front and pull in here, looking for shelter, even if we leave the sign and other lights off. Better move my Cherokee, the Sarvers’ truck, and the cars around back. We don’t want a lot of people rapping at your door wanting to know why you’re giving rooms to some people and not to them.”

  Actually, certain that the enemy was even now listening to them, Jack was using the specter of weary snow-bound motorists as a plausible excuse to move the pickup truck and the Cherokee, the two four-wheel-drive vehicles, out of sight of the observers south of 1-80. Later, when heavier snow and the early darkness of the storm settled in, the entire Tranquility family would surreptitious
ly leave the motel from the rear, heading overland in the truck and the Cherokee.

  Ernie sensed Jack’s real purpose; equally aware of eavesdroppers, he played