by Dean Koontz
Inexplicably, the people who live here seem happy. They are friendly to an annoying extent, saying to him, a total stranger, “Lovely weather!” and “Good morning!” and “Have a nice day!”
He’s been in the valley for almost thirty-six hours. If he had to live here the rest of his life, he’d go into the garage and close it up tight and start the car engine and wait to die of carbon-monoxide poisoning; indeed, he’d get down on the garage floor and suck eagerly on the tailpipe to speed up the process.
When this revolution is won, he will spend his time only in the most cosmopolitan of cities and resorts.
Maybe the citizens who live in the desiccated heart of Borrego Springs are happy because they feel greatly superior to those benighted souls who live down-valley in small clusters of residences—or even in isolated single homes—served by crudely paved or dirt roads.
Jergen and Dubose have been summoned to one of these curious neighborhoods that consists of four single-story stucco houses on spacious grassless lots along an unpaved street off Borrego Springs Road. An unmarked black Jeep Grand Cherokee blocks the entrance, manned by two Arcadians in jackets emblazoned with the letters FBI.
Because of an orientation meeting that they conducted Monday morning, Jergen and Dubose are known to every operative who has descended on the valley—whether they are FBI, NSA, Homeland, or carry multiple credentials. The VelociRaptor is waved through the roadblock, beyond which four more black Jeep Grand Cherokees are parked along the dead-end street, one in front of each house.
Dubose stops at the address to which they have been summoned, and they step out of the monster Ford.
On an ordinary night, this neighborhood, lacking streetlamps, would lie deep in darkness past 2:00 A.M. Now windows glow in the houses, providing enough ambient light, along with the declining moon, to see large moths capering for the delectation of bats that, with a thrum of membranous wings, swoop low and soar and swoop again, dining in flight.
Instead of a lawn, a thick layer of smooth plum-size stones surrounds the house, as though giant mythical birds, perhaps a flock of Arabian rocs, have stopped here during the night to cough up the contents of their craws. Here and there, specimen cacti rise from the hard landscaping, shadowy shapes like malformed dwarves out of some Tolkien dream.
Following Dubose along a walkway of concrete stepping squares, listening to overhead bats using their sharp little teeth to crunch the crisp bodies of flying-beetle entrées that are being served after the moth appetizers, Jergen feels ever more acutely that he is a stranger in a strange land.
One of the three agents assigned to the conversion of the people in this residence opens the door. “Ahmed al-Adel,” he says, for he doesn’t expect them to remember his name from the orientation meeting fifteen hours earlier. He is a tall, handsome thirtysomething son of Iraqi immigrants.
Like the others who have invaded this street with Medexpress containers filled with control mechanisms, Ahmed is clean-shaven, neatly barbered, dressed in a black suit and a white shirt and a black tie. He and the other agents came here a little more than four hours previously, at nine o’clock in the evening; but regardless of the hour, it is always easier to elicit quick, complete cooperation from people when FBI agents are dressed and carry themselves as the movies have long portrayed them.
Operating to a degree incognito, Jergen and Dubose avoid the men-in-black cliché. Jergen favors a desert-spa look: a sport coat by Ring Jacket, gray with a white micro-dot pattern; slim-cut white slacks by the same designer; gray-suede, seven-eye lace-up ankle-fit trainers by Axel Arigato. In a spirit of fun, he wears a GraffStar Eclipse ultra-slim lightweight titanium watch with an entirely black face, black hands, and black check marks instead of numbers.
Dubose, reliably a sartorial embarrassment, looks as though he just came in from plowing a cornfield and didn’t completely change clothes, but threw on a couple glitzy items to add some flash for a quick trip to Vegas.
“They’re in the kitchen,” says Ahmed.
In these houses reside eleven people who have received nanoweb control mechanisms; they will soon be enlisted in the valley-wide search for the boy and his mother. The residents of these four homes were selected for injection because none is a child below the age of sixteen. Others have been injected before these people, and still others will be injected in the remaining hours of the night.
Their controls are the latest generation and include a feature known as “the whispering room.” While activating the whispering-room feature, they can communicate via microwave transmission, brain to brain, as the celebrated Elon Musk, founder of Tesla automobiles, has predicted will one day be possible and desirable. This makes them highly effective searchers, fifty or more individuals sharing a hive mind, quickly communicating their positions, situations, and discoveries to one another.
This residence is supposed to house two people, Robert and Minette Butterworth, both in their mid-thirties—he a history teacher, she an English teacher. They are seated at the kitchen table, zip-tied to their chairs, mouths covered with duct tape, though not because there is anyone to be alerted by their cries.
Prior to the injections and during the four hours after, while the nanoconstructs foil the blood-brain barrier and assemble within their skulls, those who have been chosen to become adjusted people tend to be tedious. They demand their constitutional rights, ask insistent questions, and in general make an annoyance of themselves. Duct tape is the best cure for their tiresome prattle.
Robert and Minette are pale, wide-eyed with sustained fright, soon to be under the control of their nanowebs, but they are not the only residents of the house. A younger woman resembling Minette is also duct-taped and sits at the table in a wheelchair.
The two agents working with Ahmed al-Adel are here as well. Malcolm Kingman is an imposing African American with the face and demeanor of a caring man of the cloth, but the direct and filleting stare of a judge at the Nuremberg trials. Zita Hernandez, a pretty woman of perhaps thirty, rounds out an admirably diverse crew.
Hernandez is of the most interest to Jergen, not just because of her beauty. She wears exquisitely tailored black slacks, a white buttoned-to-the-throat shirt by Michael Kors, a black blazer from Ralph Lauren. The only thing she needs help with is her shoes.
Jergen would like to dress her. After undressing her.
Lovely Zita indicates the pajama-clad woman in the wheelchair. “This is Glynis Gallworth, Minette’s sister. She’s visiting from Alexandria, Virginia, for a week. She was sleeping in a back bedroom. We didn’t know she was there till things were well along here in the kitchen.”
Jergen finds this bit of information perplexing. Alexandria is an upscale, sophisticated town. He is not able to imagine willingly leaving Alexandria to spend a week in a small house with unfortunate décor, on a dead-end dirt street in this desert wasteland.
Zita says, “Glynis is paraplegic ever since a spinal injury when she was a teenager. She works in the State Department in D.C. She’s too clueless about the situation to be…in the know,” by which she means to say, She’s not one of us.
Glynis appears to be as terrified as her sister and the sister’s husband.
“We injected them,” says Malcolm Kingman, “but we’re not sure if we should inject her.”
“This is Arcadian 101,” Dubose says.
Kingman and Ahmed al-Adel exchange a look, and then both look at Zita.
Dubose smiles at Glynis. “Ma’am, I’m sure you don’t know what your sister and brother-in-law got tangled in. This is an urgent matter of national security, involving a pending act of nuclear terrorism.”
The astonished Minette and Robert shake their heads and protest these outrageous charges through the duct tape.
Glynis appears both dubious and frightened, but also confused.
Dubose says, “We have an emergency FISA court order allowing
a deposition to be performed with a truth serum,” as if even a FISA court could order such a thing. “Your name is not in that court order. My associates should have known you couldn’t be included in this procedure. But because the nation’s survival is at stake and this involves top-secret information, we can’t allow you to witness the questioning of your sister and her husband.”
With that, the big man steps behind the wheelchair and rolls Glynis out of the kitchen, into the living room, and back to the bedroom where she had been sleeping.
Carter Jergen smiles at Zita Hernandez, and she holds his gaze in what seems like an expression of erotic interest.
Both Ahmed al-Adel and Malcolm Kingman flinch and grimace when the gunshot echoes from the back of the house, which does not speak well of them.
Zita, however, remains impassive even through the second and third shots. Jergen likes her a lot.
7
DEEP IN THE HEART OF Texas and high in the windowed fire watch, Laurie Longrin was up far past her usual bedtime, but she wasn’t in the least sleepy. Fear affected her like a kind of caffeine, fear for herself and her sisters and her parents.
But there was something else besides fear. She stood in the grip of an exciting expectation, waiting for the firemen to roar into sight, not in a red pumper truck with its deluge gun, but in their many pickups and SUVs, the equivalent of an old-fashioned posse, come in high Lone Star style to chase out the evildoers and save the innocent.
What she felt was in fact more than expectation. Something like exhilaration. Her fear was all mixed up with this crazy wild thrill, a reckless confidence that butt was going to be kicked, the bad cast down, the good lifted up, the world made right again.
She wasn’t a Pollyanna. She knew good didn’t always triumph, not at first try, anyway. There were a megamillion ways things could go wrong. Bad people were often more clever than good people because they spent their entire rotten lives scheming and conniving.
Nonetheless, she wasn’t some piss-your-pants pessimist. The fear that now and then shook a shudder from her was tempered by this electrifying current of delight in the prospect of seeing sudden justice done to these hateful thugs.
She hoped this didn’t mean that she was going to grow up to be one of those thrill seekers who couldn’t be happy unless they were skydiving or walking a tightrope between skyscrapers or wrestling alligators. Laurie wanted to ride horses and become a veterinarian and marry Ethan Stackpool and have maybe four children. Children and alligators were not a good combination.
When two sets of headlights, one close behind the other, turned off the state route and onto the entrance lane to Longrin Stables, the first of a freakin’ parade of righteous firemen and firewomen, the thrill of delight swelled strong in Laurie and nearly washed away her fear. She licked her split lip, which had earlier been bleeding after the Dern beast slapped her, and she thought, Kiss your own ass, Janis.
One thing Laurie didn’t need to be told about life was that from time to time everyone was met with disappointments, setbacks that tested your character and made you stronger if you kept your spine stiff and soldiered onward. She knew that, of course, but in her excitement she had forgotten about disappointments and had mistaken this one for triumph.
Neither of the SUVs that raced along the lane was driven by Mr. Linwood Haney or by any of his friends. They were black Suburbans, and the woman standing guard down there—the one named Sally Jones—recognized these newcomers and waved them past the Cadillac Escalade that partially blocked entrance. These were the six additional bad hats who, as Chris Pervert had told Janis in the hallway, were going to do sharp-elbow one-on-one interviews with the employees, scare the spunk out of them before sending them home.
Then no one would be here but Laurie, her sisters, her mom and dad—and twelve of them with their guns and their needles and their brain implants.
She stared hard into the darkness, where she knew the state route ran north and south, but there were no other headlights, no rescuers imminent.
Suddenly she realized that she didn’t have the scissors with which she’d cut the zip-ties and freed herself. She couldn’t remember where she might have put them down on the way from her bedroom to the fire watch. The scissors had been her only weapon.
8
WHEN RADLEY DUBOSE RETURNS TO the kitchen, Minette Butterworth, wrung hard by emotion, is a swollen-faced red-eyed faucet of grief with an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of tears. Behind the duct tape, when she’s not making baaa-baaa noises like a bleating sheep, she sounds as if she’s choking on her grief, swallowing her tongue.
Carter Jergen finds the woman repellent. Excessive displays of emotion are not only undignified but are always, in his opinion, as phony as a politician’s promise, a display to draw attention to the wailer and elicit from others either sympathy for her suffering or admiration for the depth of her feeling.
The husband, Robert, is beyond tears and, he would have them believe, beyond fear, as well. His eyes shine with the pure primal hatred of a maddened ape. He shouts his rage to no effect behind the swath of duct tape. He strains against his bonds and rocks the chair in which he sits.
Dubose regards this pair not with disdain, as does Jergen, but as if he is in some zoo, standing before an exhibit of two exotic animals whose droll appearance and antics he would like to have explained to him by a docent.
His interest is short-lived, and he turns to address Ahmed, Malcolm, and the lovely Zita.
“That should have been an easy call, people. In the utopia that technology is making possible for those of us who control it, do you think we ought to encourage continued production of software that’s four generations old? Why? For sentimental reasons? Should we maybe keep useless workers on a warehouse payroll just so they can watch the robots do the job more efficiently after the place has been automated?”
Ahmed and Malcolm look abashed, though it’s difficult to tell whether they are embarrassed by their own failure to act according to Arcadian principles or are disturbed by Dubose’s comparisons of outdated software and displaced workers to Glynis.
Dubose continues. “For those who don’t belong with us inside this scientific revolution, utilitarian bioethics must always apply. Society can’t waste resources on those millions among the masses who receive far more than they’ll ever produce. Such profligate spending has collapsed other civilizations.”
The lovely Zita wishes to contribute. “Besides,” she says, “it’s a matter of compassion. Quality of life. It’s cruel to force people who can never be whole to live in diminished circumstances.”
“Exactly,” Dubose agrees. “We can stop those with diminished capacities from ever being born. But we also have to show the same compassion to those who, born whole, are later broken in one way or another.”
Dismayingly, Zita Hernandez is now looking at the hillbilly philosopher with undeniable erotic interest, in fact with greater intensity than that with which earlier she had seemed to regard Carter Jergen.
“For the record,” says Dubose, “Jane Hawk attempted to take refuge in this house and, for whatever psychotic reason, she shot Glynis to death.”
Ahmed, Malcolm, and Zita all seem to be good with that.
When their control mechanisms are in place, Minette and Robert will forget what they are told to forget and will remember whatever scenario is described to them.
Dubose lifts his chin, striking a noble pose, and says, “Carry on, people,” as if he is some great general bucking up the troops or a wise and inspiring statesman equal to Churchill.
He leads Jergen out of the dismal house, into a night of flying beetles and beetle-eating bats, into the astringent smell of coyote urine rising from the surrounding stonescape. In the near distance, the pack of urinators, now on the hunt, issue shrill and eerie cries as if so maddened by the scent of prey that they must spill its blood at once or e
lse, in a frenzy, tear themselves apart.
Dubose drives.
Although Jergen often finds his partner lacking in manners, crude, and a social embarrassment, he admires Dubose’s ruthlessness and implacable intent.
“You shot her three times,” he says as Dubose wheels the VelociRaptor away from the house.
“Yeah.”
“One point-blank hollow-point didn’t kill her?”
“Put it in her chest, she was stone dead.”
“Then why two more?”
“Didn’t like her expression.”
“What about it?”
“She didn’t look dead enough. Just…sort of sneering, smug.”
“Well, she worked at the State Department,” Jergen reminds him.
“Yeah, we know the type.”
“So the other two shots…?”
“In the face.”
“Do the trick?”
“She looks more dead now.”
9
