The House of Thunder

by Dean Koontz

  “It’ll work,” Susan said softly, plagued by a mental image of her own body being dumped over the side of the Golden Net, into the cold waters of the Black Sea.

  “Of course it’ll work,” Viteski said happily. “In fact, we would have sent the duplicates back to the U.S. even if you had broken and had told us everything we wanted to know.” Viteski finished the brandy in his glass, sighed in appreciation of it, and got to his feet, holding the pistol. “Captain, while I cover these two, please tie their hands securely.”

  Golodkin already had the rope. He made McGee and Susan stand while he tied their hands behind their backs.

  “Now,” Viteski said, “take them someplace very private and secure.” To McGee and Susan, he said, “Your twins will visit you later. They have a number of questions about your intimate habits, things that will help them perfect their imitations. I suggest that you answer them truthfully because several of the questions are meant to test your veracity; they already know the correct answers to those test questions, and if you don’t respond properly, they’ll slowly cut you to pieces until you’re convinced that cooperation is in your best interests.”

  Susan glanced at the McGee look-alike. The man was smiling; it was not a nice smile. He looked like McGee in every respect except one: He did not have McGee’s compassion and sensitivity. He appeared to be quite capable of torturing an adversary into bloody, agonized submission.

  Susan shuddered.

  “I’ll say goodbye now,” Viteski said. “I’ll be leaving the ship before it gets underway.” He smiled smugly. “Bon voyage.”

  Golodkin ushered McGee and Susan into the corridor, while Viteski remained behind in the captain’s cabin with the look-alikes. In cold silence, refusing to reply to anything that McGee said, Leonid Golodkin escorted them to another companionway and drove them down into the bowels of the trawler, to the bottom deck, into the compartments that serviced the cargo holds. The place reeked of fish.

  He took them into a small storage locker at the foot of the companionway; it was no larger than four meters on a side. The walls were hung with spare coils of rope; thicker hawsers were coiled and braided in stacks upon the deck. The walls were also racked with tools, including gaffs and skewers. There were four block-and-tackle sets of varying sizes, and crates of spare machine parts.

  Golodkin made them sit on the bare deck, which was ice-cold. He tied their feet together, then checked to be sure that the ropes on their hands were tightly knotted. When he left, he turned off the lights and closed the door, plunging them into unrelieved blackness.

  “I’m scared,” Susan said.

  McGee didn’t reply.

  She heard him scuffling about, twisting, wrenching at something.

  “Jeff?”

  He grunted. He was straining against something in the darkness, beginning to breathe hard.

  “What’re you doing?” she asked.

  “Ssshh!” he said sharply.

  A moment later, hands groped over her, and she almost cried out in surprise before she realized it was McGee. He had freed himself, and now he was feeling for her bonds.

  As he unknotted the ropes that bound her hands, he put his mouth against her ear and spoke in the softest whisper possible. “I doubt that anyone’s listening in on us, but we can’t be too careful. Golodkin didn’t tighten my knots that last time; he loosened them just a bit.”

  Her hands came free of the ropes. She rubbed her chafed wrists. Putting her mouth to Jeff’s ear in the darkness, she said, “How much more will he do to help us?”

  “Probably nothing,” McGee whispered. “He’s already taken an enormous risk. From here on, we can count only on ourselves. We won’t be given another chance.”

  He moved away from her as she got to her feet. He fumbled in the darkness for a while before he finally found the light switch and flipped it on.

  Even before McGee moved away from the switch, Susan knew what he would go after, and she shivered with revulsion.

  As she had anticipated, he went straight to the long-handled, fishermen’s gaffs that hung on the wall and pulled two of them out of the spring-clips that held them. The slightly curved hooks at the ends of the gaffs were wickedly sharp; the light glinted on the pointed tips.

  Susan took one of the weapons when Jeff handed it to her, but she whispered, “I can’t.”

  “You’ve got to.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Your life or theirs,” he whispered urgently.

  She nodded.

  “You can do it,” he said. “And if we’re lucky, it’ll be easy. They won’t be expecting anything. I’m sure they aren’t aware that Golodkin locked us in a room full of handy weapons.”

  She watched while he decided upon the best positions from which to launch a surprise attack, and then she stood where he told her.

  He turned out the lights again.

  It was the deepest darkness she had ever known.

  McGee heard a furtive, rustling noise in the dark. He stiffened, cocked his head, listened attentively. Then he realized what it was, and he relaxed. He called softly to Susan, “Just a rat.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Susan?”

  “I’m okay,” she said softly from her position on the other side of the small cabin. “Rats don’t worry me.”

  In spite of their precarious situation, McGee smiled.

  They waited for long, tiresome minutes.

  The Golden Net suddenly shuddered, and the deck began to vibrate as the engines were started up. Later, bells clanged in other parts of the vessel. The quality of the deck vibrations changed when, at last, the boat’s screws began to churn in the water.

  More minutes. More waiting.

  They had been underway at least ten minutes, perhaps for a quarter of an hour, long enough to be out of Batum harbor, before there was finally a sound at the door.

  McGee tensed and raised the gaff.

  The door swung inward, and light spilled through from the corridor. The doppelgängers entered, first the woman and then the man.

  McGee was positioned to the left of the door, almost behind it. He stepped out, swung the gaff, and hooked the vicious point through the belly of his own twin, just as the man switched on the cabin lights. Revolted by the sudden gush of blood, sickened by what he had to do, nevertheless determined to do it, McGee wrenched the long-handled hook, twisted it inside his twin, trying to tear the man wide open. The gored McGee collapsed at the feet of the real McGee, flopping as if he were a fish, too shocked and too shattered by the flood of pain to scream.

  The woman had a gun. It was the same silencer-equipped pistol that Viteski had been holding in the captain’s cabin. She stumbled back in surprise and then fired a nearly silent shot at McGee.

  Missed.

  Fired again.

  McGee felt the bullet tug at his sleeve, but he had been spared a second time.

  Behind the fake Susan, the real Susan stepped out from behind a stack of crates and swung the other gaff.

  Blood exploded from the look-alike’s throat, and her eyes bulged, and the gun dropped from her hand.

  McGee’s heart twisted inside of him. Although he knew that he was witnessing the death of the look-alike, he was shaken by the terrible sight of Susan’s slender throat being pierced by the iron hook ... Susan’s sweet mouth dribbling blood ...

  The fake Susan fell to her knees, then toppled onto her side, eyes glazed, mouth open in a cry that would never be given voice.

  McGee turned and looked down at the other one, at the carbon copy of himself. The man was holding his ruined belly, trying to hold his intestines inside of him. His face was contorted in agony and, mercifully, the light of life abruptly went out of his eyes.

  It’s like seeing a preview of my own death, McGee thought as he stared down into the duplicate’s face.

  He felt cold and empty.

  He had never enjoyed killing, though he had always been able to do it when it was necessary. He suspected
he wouldn’t be able to kill any more, regardless of the need.

  Susan turned away from the bodies, stumbled into a corner, leaned against the wall, and retched violently.

  McGee closed the door.

  Later in the night, in a cabin that had been reserved for the fake Susan and the fake McGee, Susan sat on the lower of two bunk beds and said, “Does Golodkin know for sure which we are?”

  Standing by the porthole, looking out at the dark sea, McGee said, “He knows.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “He didn’t say a word to you—because he knows you couldn’t answer him in Russian.”

  “So now we go back and start feeding tricked-up data to the Russians, but they think it’s the real dope, coming from their two look-alikes.”

  “Yes,” McGee said. “If we can figure out what channels they were supposed to use to get their information out.”

  They were both silent a while. McGee seemed fascinated with the ocean, even though he could see very little of it in the darkness.

  Susan sat studying her hands, searching for any blood that she had failed to scrub away. After a while, she said, “Was that a bottle of brandy Golodkin left?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need a shot.”

  “I’ll pour you a double,” McGee said.

  At sea. Shortly after dawn.

  Susan woke, a scream caught in her throat, gasping, gagging.

  McGee switched on the light.

  For a moment Susan couldn’t remember where she was. Then it came back to her.

  Although she knew where she was, she couldn’t stop gasping. Her dream was still with her, and it was a dream that, she thought, might just possibly be a reality, too.

  McGee had jumped down from the upper bunk. He knelt beside her bed. “Susan, it’s okay. It’s really okay. We’re at sea, and we’re going to make it.”

  “No,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The crew.”

  “What about the crew?”

  “Harch, Quince, Jellicoe, and Parker. They’re all members of the crew.”

  “No, no,” he said. “You were dreaming.”

  “They’re here!” she insisted, panicky.

  “The charade is over,” McGee assured her patiently. “It’s not going to start again.”

  “They’re here, dammit!”

  He couldn’t calm her. He had to take her through the entire boat as the crew began the day’s trawling. He had to show her every room on board and let her see every crewman in order to prove to her, beyond all doubt, that Harch and the others were not aboard.

  They had breakfast in their cabin, where they could talk without rubbing Golodkin’s face in the fact that Susan couldn’t speak Russian.

  She said, “Where did they locate the look-alikes of Harch and the other three?”

  “Soviet agents in the U.S. obtained photographs of Harch and the others from newspaper and college files,” McGee said. “A search was made for Russians who even vaguely resembled the four fraternity men, and then perfection was achieved with the help of plastic surgery and the judicious use of makeup.”

  “Harch’s eyes ...”

  “Special contact lenses.”

  “Like a Hollywood film.”

  “What?”

  “Special effects.”

  “Yes, I guess they were worthy of Hollywood, all right.”

  “Jerry Stein’s corpse.”

  “A hideous piece of work, wasn’t it?”

  She began to shake uncontrollably.

  “Hey,” he said. “Easy, easy.”

  She couldn’t stop shaking.

  He held her.

  She felt better the next day on the Turkish boat after the transfer had been effected.

  Their sleeping accommodations were more comfortable, cleaner, and the food was better, too.

  Over a lunch of cold meats and cheeses, she said to McGee, “I must be important for the U.S. to sacrifice your cover to get me out of there.”

  He hesitated, then said, “Well ... that wasn’t the original plan.”

  “Huh?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to bring you out.”

  She didn’t understand.

  McGee said, “I was supposed to kill you before the Willawauk program had a chance to work on you. A bit of air in a hypodermic needle-bang, a lethal brain embolism. Something like that. Something that no one could trace to me. That way, I’d be kept in place, and there’d be no chance of the Soviets breaking you.”

  The blood had gone from her face. She had suddenly lost her appetite. “Why didn’t you kill me?”

  “Because I fell in love with you.”

  She stared at him, blinking.

  “It’s true,” he said. “During the weeks we were setting you up for the program, working with you, planting the hypnotic suggestions that sent you to the sheriff’s station and the Shipstat house, I was impressed by your strength, your strong will. It wasn’t easy to set you up and manipulate you. You had ... moxie.”

  “You fell in love with my moxie?”

  He smiled. “Something like that.”

  “And couldn’t kill me?”

  “No.”

  “They’ll be mad at you back in the States.”

  “To hell with them.”

  Two nights later, in a bedroom in the United States Ambassador’s residence in Istanbul, Susan woke, screaming.

  The maid came at a run. A security man. The ambassador and McGee.

  “The house staff,” Susan said, clutching at McGee. “We can’t trust the house staff.”

  McGee said, “None of them looks like Harch.”

  “How do I know? I haven’t seen them all,” she said.

  “Susan, it’s three o’clock in the morning,” the security man said.

  “I have to see them,” she said frantically.

  The ambassador looked at her for a moment, glanced at McGee. Then, to the security man, he said, “Assemble the staff.”

  Neither Harch nor Quince nor Jellicoe nor Parker was employed by the United States Ambassador to Turkey.

  “I’m sorry,” Susan said.

  “It’s okay,” McGee assured her.

  “It’s going to take a while,” she said apologetically.

  “Of course it will.”

  “Maybe the rest of my life,” she said.

  A week later, in Washington, D.C., in a hotel suite that was being paid for by the United States government, Susan went to bed with Jeff McGee for the first time. They were very good together. Their bodies fit together like pieces of a puzzle. They moved together fluidly, in perfect, silken rhythm. That night, for the first time since leaving Willawauk, sleeping naked with McGee, Susan did not dream.

  The year was 1980—an ancient time, so long ago and far away. Humanity was divided into armed camps, millions lived in chains, freedom was in jeopardy, and a town like Willawauk actually existed. But there is a new world order, and the human heart has been purified. Has it not? A place like Willawauk is impossible now. Evil has been purged from the human soul. Has it not?