by Dean Koontz
While in the residence, they would be alert for any indication that something was not right. They had been provided with a list of clues that might indicate sympathy for Jane Hawk and the presence of her son. Min and Bob had memorized that list, though she couldn’t recall exactly when she had studied it.
If no one was home when they came calling—quite likely to be the case, because most families needed two incomes these days—then she and Bob would enter and search the place. They had been provided with a police lock-release gun, a nifty device that could open any deadbolt.
Two German shepherds had disappeared with the boy. Minette didn’t understand why kidnappers would take dogs or why the dogs would allow themselves to be taken. But that’s the way it was. No point in puzzling over it. No point at all. Just accept the facts and move on. Do what you’re told. Be useful. The dogs weren’t dangerous. She and Bob didn’t have to worry about being bitten. No need to worry at all. In fact, if they found two German shepherds that responded to the names Duke and Queenie, then the boy would be somewhere nearby. However, there was a chance that the kidnappers found the dogs to be too much trouble and killed them. Therefore, it was necessary to search outside each residence, too, for any signs that something had recently been buried on the property.
Minette thought she would be nervous about entering other people’s homes uninvited and poking around in their things. But at the second, fourth, and fifth of the first five houses, when no one answered the bell or knock, she breezed through those places with no sense that what she was doing might be improper or dangerous.
After all, they were working with the authorities as part of a new citizen’s support team for the police. They were doing the right thing. It wasn’t dangerous, really. Heck, it wasn’t dangerous at all. There was nothing to be concerned about. Nothing. Nothing at all. Besides, it felt so darn good to be useful.
The fifth house belonged to Walter and Louise Atlee, parents of Minette’s student Colter Atlee. Colter was a nice kid, good student, and Minette thought it unlikely that his mom and dad would be mixed up with kidnappers. But a little boy’s life was in jeopardy, and it was like that nice African American policeman, Deputy Kingman, had said—these days, you just couldn’t be sure who anyone was or what they might do. You couldn’t risk a little boy’s life by giving a pass to people like Walter and Louise Atlee just because you thought you could be sure they were good people.
As Minette pored through the papers taken from the desk in Walter Atlee’s study, a weird thing happened. Speaking in a stage whisper and yet bell-clear, a man’s angry voice spewed out a long stream of obscene and blasphemous words, dozens and dozens of them, like the ravings of a madman, as disgusting as they were meaningless. She had never heard anything so raw and vicious. The whisperer sounded as though he must be there in the study with her, but she was alone.
When the voice fell silent after perhaps half a minute, Bob entered the study. “Min, what the hell? You hear that?”
“Yeah. I did. Someone’s in the house.”
“No one’s here but us.”
The cursing resumed, still a stage whisper but louder than before, and Minette realized the voice wasn’t in the study, after all. It was in her head.
“The whispering room,” she said.
She’d never heard that term before, but she knew immediately what it meant, and it neither surprised nor frightened her. The whispering room allowed microwave communication between others like her and Bob, others who had been made useful. When you had something important to share in the whispering room, it went out to everyone else who had a whispering room within a radius of twenty miles, so they could be coordinated for a purpose and function well together. Functioning smoothly together was essential in this increasingly dysfunctional world. The whispering room was a tool that made a person more useful.
Unfortunately, the angry and incoherent man grossly misused this wonderful new service, this internal Twitter system. Rather than communicating something helpful to others, he broadcast an insane, vitriolic rant. And now with the words came sharp attitude, fierce emotion. Minette could not only hear the sender’s fury, but also feel it, his lust and bloodlust, carried on the words, woven through the obscenities, so that she felt unclean and assaulted. Those vile words came in repetitious, rhythmic rushes like some ferocious canticle, building in intensity, building and building until it had the power of a Gregorian chant, suddenly louder, more insistent, and Minette had no way to disconnect from it, his fury exploding into her head.
Shaken, she sat in the office chair to wait out the onslaught, but soon needed to grip the desk with both hands, as if it were a wave-tossed fragment of a sunken ship, her one desperate hope of staying above water on a storm-racked and rolling sea. The vulgar salvos of hate and threat grew in volume and velocity, became a constant cannonade of malevolent words twined with caustic emotions that were alien to her, emotions hot with cruel desire but that howled through her like an arctic wind. In the progress of the storm, she realized that no longer were all the sounds in the sender’s rant words, but now also shrieks and hisses and shrill cries like the keening of coyotes chasing down prey, and with this difference came a change in the nature of the emotions flooding into her whispering room, a new coarseness, a primitive bludgeoning-shredding power that was both terrifying and alluring. The sender’s transmission swelled into a fierce declaration of freedom from all obligations and all consequences, a celebration of the thrill of violent rape, killing, and the savage destruction of all that is the Other. As this river of alien emotion sluiced through the channels of her brain, Minette became mildly apprehensive as she felt something slowly eroding within her, as if this influx from the sender were a solvent.
Near the door to the hallway, Bob had dropped to his knees and then fallen onto his side. He lay with his hands clasped to his head, but otherwise in the fetal position, with his back bent and knees drawn toward his chest, as though preparing to be born again.
Minette lost all ability to judge the pace of the passage of time. Whether the invasion of her whispering room and, therefore, her mind lasted minutes or hours, she couldn’t say. But the sense that something essential was eroding from her continued, although the disquiet that initially troubled her soon passed, and in its place arose an agreeable anticipation.
Moments after her apprehension was rinsed from Minette, her Bobby came out of the fetal position, whereupon he did something unexpected and exciting.
1
LUTHER TILLMAN, FOUR TIMES ELECTED sheriff of a mostly rural county in Minnesota, was tall and solidly built, yet he moved with catlike quiet. When he opened the door of the motor home and stepped inside, Jane knew at once that he’d arrived, not because the vehicle softly protested when it took his weight, but because the man had presence.
She’d last seen him twelve days earlier, when he and his daughter Jolie had gone to ground in Texas with friends of hers, Leland and Nadine Sacket, entrepreneurs and now philanthropists, operators of the Sacket Home and School for orphaned children. At Jane’s request, Leland had flown Luther to Palm Springs in the Sackets’ Learjet this morning and had driven him to Indio in a rental car.
Because he had been tied to Jane by the authorities and the press, he had shaved his head since she’d last seen him, and his face was beginning to disappear behind a flourishing salt-and-pepper beard. He had spent most of his life in uniforms and suits, a pillar of the community; now he wore red sneakers, black jeans, a killer T-shirt featuring the face of the singer and actress Janelle Monáe, a loose black-denim jacket cut to mid-thigh, the better to carry a concealed weapon, and a bling necklace of silver chain links. He looked like Dennis Haysbert might have looked in the role of a fiftysomething gang leader in the hood, a godfather of street crime, if Haysbert had ever been given a chance to play such a character.
Jane slid out of the dinette booth, where she’d been checking out various
items she had purchased from her forged-documents source in Reseda, and got to her feet. “You’re not as pretty as Janelle Monáe, but you look damn good to me.”
As they hugged each other, he said, “I doubt I can kick ass like Janelle, but I’m ready to do my best.”
They had been through a lot together in the two days between when they met in Iron Furnace, Kentucky, and parted in Texas. Jane not only trusted him with her own life but with that of her child.
He said, “I don’t know how you don’t look tired, all you’ve been through.”
“I’m tired enough,” she said, “and scared. Travis is safe for the moment, hidden away. But they know he’s somewhere in Borrego Valley, and if we don’t get to him soon, these sonsofbitches will.”
She led him to the dinette booth, and they sat facing each other across the table.
Luther had picked up the trail of the Arcadian conspiracy when a friend of his, a schoolteacher named Cora Gundersun, had committed suicide in a flamboyant fashion, taking forty-six other people with her, including a governor and congressman. He had not believed she was capable of such an atrocity. His reward for dogged and brilliant detective work had been the loss of his wife, Rebecca, and his older daughter, Twyla, who had been injected with control mechanisms and were now enslaved. His younger daughter, seventeen-year-old Jolie, remained in hiding with the Sackets in Texas.
“How did Jolie take it when you told her you were coming here?”
“Pretty much how a Marine wife like you takes bad news. Jolie doesn’t swoon and get the vapors. She thinks I can single-handedly break these bastards, so she’s all for us taking them down to get your boy. For such a smart girl, she has too much faith in me.”
“Only what’s been earned,” Jane said. “You’re not carrying any ID, are you?”
“No.”
“Now you are.”
She slid a driver’s license across the table. The photo was the one he had emailed to the house of the dancing gnomes in Reseda.
“It’s on file with the DMV in Sacramento,” she said. “So it’ll pass any police check. You’re now Wilson Ellington from Burbank. The street address is real, and it’s an apartment complex, but there’s no apartment twenty-five. They stop at twenty-four.”
“You know the best sources. Incredible quality,” Luther said, studying the hologram of the Great Seal of the State of California that appeared and disappeared as the license was viewed from different angles.
“Maybe I’ve always belonged on the dark side of the law.”
“In this topsy-turvy time, your side is the right side. I imagine you have a plan.”
“I’ll go over it with you. You ever fired an automatic assault shotgun?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve never even seen one.”
“You’ll like it.”
“What do we need it for?”
“Insurance. Just in case.”
2
THE RANT WAS A RIVER racing, currents of words rippled through with wordless expressions of rage and need and hatred, a tireless primal scream as nuanced as Nature herself, a corrosive erosive flood tide surging through Minette, so loud now that no sound in the world around her could compete….
Such a great volume poured into her and nothing poured out, for she had been struck dumb by the power of this tsunami of sound and primitive emotion. She sat behind the desk with her mouth agape but issuing only silence. To make room for the incoming dark deluge, structures within her dissolved.
The fear evoked by the assault faded. A tentative excitement rose in her and soon grew into a thrill born from a sense of wild possibilities, feral freedom.
Bob, Bobby, her man, he let go, let loose, went for it, tore a picture off the wall and smashed it repeatedly against an armchair, glass shattering-flying, frame splintering. He dropped the ruined picture and picked up the chair, the big chair—such strength, such power—and threw it, just threw the chair into a freestanding set of bookshelves, and the shelves toppled and the books spilled across the floor. He snatched up a book and tore it apart and threw it away and snatched up another, ripped off the dust jacket, ripped off the boards, ripped with the animal glee of a predator rending its prey. His face wrenched with rage, yet she thought he might be laughing, delighting in both his fury and the destruction.
She understood, she did, how all this clutter of humanity could infuriate, the way they lived, their pretension, so many things all around, too many things. The voice screaming in her whispering room was calling her to something better, to something pure, calling her to break free of this humdrum existence, to shuck off the bonds of bullshit civilization, admit to her true essence, which was animal, to stop striving for the sake of striving, to cast off the burden that millions of years of change had layered on her kind until it crushed her animal spirit.
He, the man, he ripped the shade off a floor lamp, picked the lamp up by its pole, swung it like a hammer, the heavy base smashing several porcelain figures, ladies in fine gowns. It was so exciting to see the fancy bitches’ hands torn from their glossy arms, their arms from their bodies, exhilarating to see their bodies shattered and headless on the floor. The man sweating and red-faced and so powerful. She couldn’t remember his name. Her own name eluded her, didn’t matter, any name was a burden, like a brand on cattle, the hateful slave mark society burned onto you.
He looked at her, the man, the male, he looked. She could feel his wild delight, joy, rapture in throwing off all restraints. There was a thing on the desk before her—the word computer passed through her mind but meant nothing to her—and she picked it up, raised it high, threw it. Tethered to the wall by cords of some kind, it took brief flight, came to a sudden stop in midair, and ripped free of the wall with a spurt of sparks. It crashed to the floor, and the sound of the impact shivered through her, untying knots that she’d never known existed. She began to come loose and free.
3
EGON GOTTFREY CHECKS INTO A hotel in Beaumont to take time to discern what the script expects of him. The hotel is so lacking in character that he feels as though he has taken a room in the mere concept of a hotel—which, given his radical philosophical nihilism, is exactly what he’s done.
Nevertheless, because food and drink have taste and effect even if they are unreal, he goes downstairs for lunch, to have a sandwich and a drink or two at the hotel bar. A pressed-copper ceiling, walls and floor and booths and tables and chairs of dark wood, and red-vinyl upholstery are reflected in a long back-bar mirror, so the place seems immense and even lonelier than it is.
The bartender is a tall guy with big hair and a bigger gut. But with a cold stare and a grim expression, Gottfrey turns the man from a hearty-Texas-howdy type into a quiet, efficient server.
He is sipping his second Scotch when his bacon cheeseburger is served, and he’s two bites into the sandwich when a fussy-looking professorial type sits at the bar with one stool between them.
This obvious walk-on character has unkempt white hair and white eyebrows that haven’t been trimmed since the turn of the millennium. He’s wearing a black onyx stud in one ear, wire-rimmed half-lens glasses, a bow tie, a plaid shirt, a classic tweed sport coat, brown wool pants, and white athletic socks with moccasin-style loafers. The man is so detailed and so not Texan that Gottfrey realizes the Unknown Playwright is using the professor as an avatar, stepping into the play to deliver a message that must not be ignored.
The professor orders the same Scotch that Gottfrey is drinking, which is another sign of his importance to the story. While the man waits for his drink, he opens a thick paperback and sits reading, as if unaware that another customer watches from one stool removed.
Gottfrey understands the Playwright’s narrative structure well enough to know that the book matters. In fact, it seems to glow in the faux professor’s hands. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson. Judging by the cover, it’
s a work of nonfiction set in Nazi Germany.
Gottfrey finishes half his burger before he says, “Good book?”
Pretending to be surprised that anyone shares the bar with him, the professor pulls his reading glasses farther down his nose and peers over them at Gottfrey. “It’s brilliant, actually. A chilling depiction of an entire society descending from normalcy into almost universal madness in just a year or so. I feel a disturbing parallel to our own times and that long-ago Nazi ascendancy.”
Gottfrey says, “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Hitler and that ragtag crew around him—they seemed to be such a bunch of clowns, though I guess they couldn’t have been just that.”
This observation inspires a sense of intellectual brotherhood in the professor. He swivels on his barstool to more directly face Gottfrey, puts aside the book, and grips his Scotch glass in an age-spotted fist. “They were precisely what you say—a cabal of clowns, foolish misfits and geeks and thugs, pretenders to philosophical depth, ignorant know-nothings who fancied themselves intellectuals.”
Gottfrey nods thoughtfully. “Yet they led an entire nation into a war and genocide that killed tens of millions.”
“Our own time, sir, is infested with their ilk.”
“But how,” Gottfrey wonders. “How could they so easily lead a rational nation into ruin?”
“Yes, how? Look at them. Goering had a soft baby face. Horst Wessel was a chinless wonder. Had he been an actor, Martin Bormann would’ve been typecast as a gangster. Himmler, a sexless nebbish. Hess really looked like a Neanderthal! But they understood the power of symbols—swastika, Nazi flag—the power of rituals and costumes. Those Nazi uniforms, the SS especially. Hitler in trench coats and battle jackets! A bunch of dishrags made glamorous with costumes. They were pretenders, actors, assigning to themselves leadership roles and giving stellar performances…for a while. Beware actors who can become anyone they wish to be; they are in fact no one at all, cold and empty, though they can be pied pipers to the masses.”
