Koontz, Dean - Dark Rivers of the Heart

by Dark Rivers Of The Heart(Lit)

  He couldn't linger for long. There was much yet to do and not a lot of time in which to do it. Nevertheless, he wanted to spend a few minutes of quality time with Mrs. Bettonfield.

  While the Beatles sang "And I Love Her" and "Tell Me Why," Roy Miro tenderly held his late friend's hand and took a moment to appreciate the exquisite furniture, the paintings, the art objects, the warm color scheme, and the array of fabrics in different but wonderfully complementary patterns and textures.

  "It's so very unfair that you had to close your shop," he told Penelope. "You were a fine interior designer. You really were, dear lady. You really were."

  The Beatles sang.

  Rain beat upon the windows.

  Roy's heart swelled with emotion.

  THREE

  Rocky recognized the route home. Periodically, as they passed one landmark or another, he chuffed softly with pleasure.

  Spencer lived in a part of Malibu that was without glamour but that had its own wild beauty.

  All the forty-room Mediterranean and French mansions, the ultra-modern cliff-side dwellings of tinted glass and redwood and steel, the Cape Cod cottages as large as ocean liners, the twenty-thousand-square-foot Southwest adobes with authentic lodgepole ceilings and authentic twenty-seat personal screening rooms with THX sound, were on the beaches, on the bluffs above the beaches—and inland of the Pacific Coast Highway, on hills with a view of the sea.

  Spencer's place was east of any home that Architectural Digest would choose to photograph, halfway up an unfashionable and sparsely populated canyon. The two-lane blacktop was textured by patches atop patches and by numerous cracks courtesy of the earthquakes that regularly quivered through the entire coast. A pipe-and-chain-link gate, between a pair of mammoth eucalyptuses, marked the entrance to his two-hundred-yard-long gravel driveway.

  Wired to the gate was a rusted sign with fading red letters: DANGER / ATTACK DOG. He had fixed it there when he first purchased the place, long before Rocky had come to live with him. There had been no dog then, let alone one trained to kill. The sign was an empty threat, but effective. No one ever bothered him in his retreat.

  The gate was not electrically operated. He had to get out in the rain to unlock it and to relock it after he'd driven through.

  With only one bedroom, a living room, and a large kitchen, the structure at the end of the driveway was not a house, really, but a cabin. The cedar-clad exterior, perched on a stone foundation to foil termites, weathered to a lustrous silver gray, might have appeared shabby to an unappreciative eye; to Spencer it was beautiful and full of character in the wash of the Explorer's headlights.

  The cabin was sheltered—surrounded, shrouded, encased—by a eucalyptus grove. The trees were red gums, safe from the Australian beetles that had been devouring California blue gums for more than a decade. They had not been topped since Spencer had bought the place.

  Beyond the grove, brush and scrub oak covered the canyon floor and the steep slopes to the ridges. Summer through autumn, leached of moisture by dry Santa Ana winds, the hills and the ravines became tinder. Twice in eight years, firefighters had ordered Spencer to evacuate, when blazes in neighboring canyons might have swept down on him as mercilessly as judgment day. Wind-driven flames could move at express-train speeds. One night they might overwhelm him in his sleep. But the beauty and privacy of the canyon justified the risk.

  At various times in his life, he had fought hard to stay alive, but he was not afraid to die. Sometimes he even embraced the thought of going to sleep and never waking. When fears of fire troubled him, he worried not about himself but about Rocky.

  That Wednesday night in February, the burning season was months away. Every tree and bush and blade of wild grass dripped rain and seemed as if it would be forever impervious to fire.

  The house was cold. It could be heated by a big river-rock fireplace in the living room, but each room also had its own in-wall electric heater. Spencer preferred the dancing light, the crackle, and the smell of a log fire, but he switched on the heaters because he was in a hurry.

  After changing from his damp clothes into a comfortable gray jogging suit and athletic socks, he brewed a pot of coffee. For Rocky, he set out a bowl of orange juice.

  The mutt had many peculiarities besides a taste for orange juice. For one thing, though he enjoyed going for walks during the day, he had none of a dog's usual frisky interest in the nocturnal world, preferring to keep at least a window between himself and the night; if he had to go outside after sunset, he stayed close to Spencer and regarded the darkness with suspicion. Then there was Paul Simon. Rocky was indifferent to most music, but Simon's voice enchanted him; if Spencer put on a Simon album, especially Graceland, Rocky would sit in front of the speakers, staring intently, or pace the floor in lazy, looping patterns—off the beat, lost in reverie—to "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" or "You Can Call Me Al." Not a doggy thing to do. Less doggy still was his bashfulness about bodily functions, for he wouldn't make his toilet if watched; Spencer had to turn his back before Rocky would get down to business.

  Sometimes Spencer thought that the dog, having suffered a hard life until two years ago and having had little reason to find joy in a canine's place in the world, wanted to be a human being.

  That was a big mistake. People were more likely to live a dog's life, in the negative sense of the phrase, than were most dogs.

  "Greater self-awareness," he'd told Rocky on a night when sleep wouldn't come, "doesn't make a species any happier, pal. If it did, we'd have fewer psychiatrists and barrooms than you dogs have—and it's not that way, is it?"

  Now, as Rocky lapped at the juice in the bowl on the kitchen floor, Spencer carried a mug of coffee to the expansive L-shaped desk in one corner of the living room. Two computers with large hard-disk capacities, a full-color laser printer, and other pieces of equipment were arrayed from one end of the work surface to the other.

  That corner of the living room was his office, though he had not held a real job in ten months. Since leaving the Los Angeles Police Department—where, during his last two years, he'd been on assignment to the California Multi-Agency Task Force on Computer Crime—he had spent several hours a day on-line with his own computers.

  Sometimes he researched subjects of interest to him, through Prodigy and GEnie. More often, however, he explored ways to gain unapproved access to private and government computers that were protected by sophisticated security programs.

  Once entry was achieved, he was engaged in illegal activity. He never destroyed any company's or agency's files, never inserted false data. Still, he was guilty of trespassing in private domains.

  He could live with that.

  He was not seeking material rewards. His compensation was knowledge—and the occasional satisfaction of righting a wrong.

  Like the Beckwatt case.

  The previous December, when a serial child molester— Henry Beckwatt—was to be released from prison after serving less than five years, the California State Parole Board had refused, in the interest of prisoners' rights, to divulge the name of the community in which he would be residing during the term of his parole. Because Beckwatt had beaten some of his victims and expressed no remorse, his pending release raised anxiety levels in parents statewide.

  Taking great pains to cover his tracks, Spencer had first gained entry to the Los Angeles Police Department's computers, stepped from there to the state attorney general's system in Sacramento, and from there into the parole board's computer, where he finessed the address to which Beckwatt would be paroled. Anonymous tips to a few reporters forced the parole board to delay action until a secret new placement could be worked out. During the following five weeks, Spencer exposed three more addresses for Beckwatt, shortly after each was arranged.

  Although officials had been in a frenzy to uncover an imagined snitch within the parole system, no one had wondered, at least not publicly, if the leak had been from their electronic-data files, sprung by a clever hacker.
Finally admitting defeat, they paroled Beckwatt to an empty caretaker's house on the grounds of San Quentin.

  In a couple of years, when his period of post-prison supervision ended, Beckwatt would be free to prowl again, and he would surely destroy more children psychologically if not physically. For the time being, however, he was unable to settle into a lair in the middle of a neighborhood of unsuspecting innocents.

  If Spencer could have discovered a way to access God's computer, he would have tampered with Henry Beckwatt's destiny by giving him an immediate and mortal stroke or by walking him into the path of a runaway truck. He wouldn't have hesitated to ensure the justice that modern society, in its Freudian confusion and moral paralysis, found difficult to impose.

  He was not a hero, not a scarred and computer-wielding cousin of Batman, not out to save the world. Mostly, he sailed cyberspace—that eerie dimension of energy and information within computers and computer networks—simply because it fascinated him as much as Tahiti and far Tortuga fascinated some people, enticed him in the way that the moon and Mars enticed the men and women who became astronauts.

  Perhaps the most appealing aspect of that other dimension was the potential for exploration and discovery that it offered—without direct human interaction. When Spencer avoided computer bulletin boards and other user-to-user conversations, cyberspace was an uninhabited universe, created by human beings yet strangely devoid of them. He wandered through vast structures of data, which were infinitely more grand than the pyramids of Egypt, the ruins of ancient Rome, or the rococo hives of the world's great cities—yet saw no human face, heard no human voice. He was Columbus without shipmates, Magellan walking alone across electronic highways and through metropolises of data as unpopulated as ghost towns in the Nevada wastelands.

  Now, he sat before one of his computers, switched it on, and sipped coffee while it went through its start-up procedures. These included the Norton AntiVirus program, to be sure that none of his files had been contaminated by a destructive bug during his previous venture into the national data webs. The machine was uninfected.

  The first telephone number that he entered was for a service offering twenty-four-hour-a-day stock market quotations. In seconds, the connection was made, and a greeting appeared on his computer screen: WELCOME TO WORLDWIDE STOCK MARKET INFORMATION, INC.

  Using his subscriber ID, Spencer requested information about Japanese stocks. Simultaneously he activated a parallel program that he had designed himself and that searched the open phone line for the subtle electronic signature of a listening device. Worldwide Stock Market Information was a legitimate data service, and no police agency had reason to eavesdrop on its lines; therefore, evidence of a tap would indicate that his own telephone was being monitored.

  Rocky padded in from the kitchen and rubbed his head against Spencer's leg. The mutt couldn't have finished his orange juice so quickly. He was evidently more lonely than thirsty.

  Keeping his attention on the video display, waiting for an alarm or an all-clear, Spencer reached down with one hand and gently scratched behind the dog's ears.

  Nothing he had done as a hacker could have drawn the attention of the authorities, but caution was advisable. In recent years, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other organizations had established computer-crime divisions, all of which zealously prosecuted offenders.

  Sometimes they were almost criminally zealous. Like every overstaffed government agency, each computer-crime project was eager to justify its ever increasing budget. Every year a greater number of arrests and convictions was required to support the contention that electronic theft and vandalism were escalating at a frightening rate. Consequently, from time to time, hackers who had stolen nothing and who had wrought no destruction were brought to trial on flimsy charges. They weren't prosecuted with any intention that, by their example, they would deter crime; their convictions were sought merely to create the statistics that ensured higher funding for the project.

  Some of them were sent to prison.

  Sacrifices on the altars of bureaucracy.

  Martyrs to the cyberspace underground.

  Spencer was determined never to become one of them.

  As the rain rattled against the cabin roof and the wind stirred a whispery chorus of lamenting ghosts from the eucalyptus grove, he waited, with his gaze fixed on the upper-right corner of the video screen. In red letters, a single word appeared: CLEAR.

  No taps were in operation.

  After logging off Worldwide Stock Market, he dialed the main computer of the California Multi-Agency Task Force on Computer Crime. He entered that system by a deeply concealed back door that he had inserted prior to resigning as second in command of the unit.

  Because he was accepted at the system-manager level (the highest security clearance), all functions were available to him. He could use the task force's computer as long as he wanted, for whatever purpose he wished, and his presence wouldn't be observed or recorded.

  He had no interest in their files. He used their computer only as a jumping-off point into the Los Angeles Police Department system, to which they had direct access. The irony of employing a computer-crime unit's hardware and software to commit even a minor computer crime was appealing.

  It was also dangerous.

  Nearly everything that was fun, of course, was also a little dangerous: riding roller coasters, skydiving, gambling, sex.

  From the LAPD system, he entered the California Department of Motor Vehicles computer in Sacramento. He got such a kick from making those leaps that he felt almost as though he had traveled physically, teleporting from his canyon in Malibu to Los Angeles to Sacramento, in the manner of a character in a science fiction novel.

  Rocky jumped onto his hind legs, planted his forepaws on the edge of the desk, and peered at the computer screen.

  "You wouldn't enjoy this," Spencer said.

  Rocky looked at him and issued a short, soft whine.

  "I'm sure you'd get a lot more pleasure from chewing on that new rawhide bone I got you."

  Peering at the screen again, Rocky inquisitively cocked his furry head.

  "Or I could put on some Paul Simon for you."

  Another whine. Longer and louder than before.

  Sighing, Spencer pulled another chair next to his own. "All right. When a fella has a bad case of the lonelies, I guess chewing on a rawhide bone just isn't as good as having a little company. Never works for me, anyway."

  Rocky hopped into the chair, panting and grinning.

  Together, they went voyaging in cyberspace, plunging illegally into the galaxy of DMV records, searching for Valerie Keene.

  They found her in seconds. Spencer had hoped for an address different from the one he already knew, but he was disappointed. She was listed at the bungalow in Santa Monica, where he had discovered unfurnished rooms and the photo of a cockroach nailed to one wall.

  According to the data that scrolled up the screen, she had a Class C license, without restrictions. It would expire in a little less than four years. She had applied for the license and taken a written test in early December, two months ago.

  Her middle name was Ann.

  She was twenty-nine. Spencer had guessed twenty-five.

  Her driving record was free of violations.

  In the event that she was gravely injured and her own life could not be saved, she had authorized the donation of her vital organs.

  Otherwise, the DMV offered little information about her:

  SEX: F HAIR: BRN EYES: BRN

  HT: 5-4 WT: 115

  That bureaucratic thumbnail description wouldn't be of much help when Spencer needed to describe her to someone. It was insufficient to conjure an image that included the things that truly distinguished her: the direct and clear-eyed stare, the slightly lopsided smile, the dimple in her right cheek, the delicate line of her jaw.

  Since last year, with federal funding from the National Crime and Terrorism Prevention Act,
the California DMV had been digitizing and electronically storing photographs and thumbprints of new and renewing drivers. Eventually, there would be mug shots and prints on file for every resident with a driver's license, though the vast majority had never been accused of a crime, let alone convicted.

  Spencer considered this the first step toward a national ID card, an internal passport of the type that had been required in the communist states before they had collapsed, and he was opposed to it on principle. In this instance, however, his principles didn't prevent him from calling up the photo from Valerie's license.

  The screen flickered, and she appeared. Smiling.

  The banshee eucalyptuses whisper-wailed complaints of eternity's indifference, and the rain drummed, drummed.

  Spencer realized that he was holding his breath. He exhaled.

  Peripherally, he was aware of Rocky staring at him curiously, then at the screen, then at him again.

  He picked up the mug and sipped some black coffee. His hand was shaking.

  Valerie had known that authorities of one kind or another were hunting her, and she had known that they were getting close—because she had vacated her bungalow only hours before they'd come for her. If she was innocent, why would she settle for the unstable and fear-filled life of a fugitive?

  Putting the mug aside and his fingers to the keyboard, he asked for a hard copy of the photo on the screen.

  The laser printer hummed. A single sheet of white paper slid out of the machine.

  Valerie. Smiling.

  In Santa Monica, no one had called for surrender before the assault on the bungalow had begun. When the attackers burst inside, there had been no warning shouts of Police! Yet Spencer was certain that those men had been officers of one law-enforcement agency or another because of their uniformlike dress, night-vision goggles, weaponry, and military methodology.